i don't know man, there's a few stall decks that i can think of in modern and legacy that would kill to have 4 copies specifically to get the best theoretical opener. Then you run Echo of Eons with some graveyard recursion and you're golden.
Sharazad is terrible if you want to win the game, but the potential for stalling and playing the clock is insane. Without any copy or recursion effect, if you manage to cast every copy in your deck every subgame you'll have to play 16 games in total 4 3 2 1 0 3 2 1 0 2 1 0 1 0 0 2 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0
Note on Lurrus: It only restricts permanent spells (for some reason) so you can still play expensive instants and sorceries with Lurrus as your commander. This lead to a lot of legacy decks making no changes whatsoever and just adding it, while still playing force of will.
This made me think of the story about the play-tester who prevented Time Walk from being printed with the wording "opponent loses next turn" because he pointed out how else that could be interpreted.
@@RGC_animation time walk: take an extra turn after this one. There are also other wordings you could use. Your opponent skips their next turn. But you could write it as "your opponent loses (their) next turn. That would mean some guy in some tournament would argue that he understands it not as" you get an extra turn" but "your opponent loses the game"
Target player loses next turn can just mean the game itself since this was 1993, there wasn't a way to clarify wording like that at the time. Take an extra turn is understood because both players take turns back and forth normally.
One really important thing about Familiar is the fact that "sacrifice a creature" is part of the Oven's cost, not the effect. Costs don't go on the stack - they resolve instantly. So if you use a removal spell on the cat, its controller can just sacrifice it to the Oven and you can't respond. So the easiest way you'd shut down this combo - exiling the cat - doesn't work, because it's never going to be on the battlefield with the oven tapped. The claim that it generated too many triggers and made people pass priority too often on Arena seems like BS, though. There are SO MANY cards and combos that cause that kind of thing. The thing that really needs fixing on Arena is how auto-pass works. They just need a button or keyboard shortcut that lets you pass until the end of the phase no matter what happens, or something like that.
It's worth noting that the cat's own templating also doubles as protection the other way around, rendering it all but effectively impervious to effects attempting to exile it from the owner's graveyard due to the 0 mana activation cost and instant speed capacity to return to the battlefield. Unless the cat player somehow literally only has one food token to sac and the opponent is ready with a spell in response on the spot, cards like Cling to Dust or Soul-Guide lantern that were literally intended to function as countermeasures against graveyard strategies in the same standard format were unlikely to succeed at stopping a Cauldron Familiar in all but the most ideal circumstances.
What happend to “as an additional cost to…”? tapping and mana payment (both represent symbolically) as well as pay x life (because it says pay) make sense as parts of cost, other things don’t and therefor realy should have that written to be easier for new players to understand. So it would be for the oven: [tap symbol] as an additional cost to activating this ability sacrefice a creature. Create a food token, if the creatures toughness was at least 4 create two of those tokens instead.
@@algotkristoffersson15 An "additional cost" doesn't go on the stack either, so that wouldn't change the fact that the cat being sacrificed is faster than anything the opponent can do.
@@GiganticPawUnit no but it would make it easier to tell that that is the case, scince it being a cost wouldn’t be hidden behind a single, easy for new players to miss symbol but rather spelled out clearly, meaning understanding it just requires knowledge of the basic rules, rather than also a easy once you learn it but difficult to learn formatting guideline.
They banned self-destruct button because it's an abuseable stall decks, that they can retry the game until either the playe rans out of game or you succeed using a slow OTK card.
Fun fact about Cauldron Familiar: It actually got sort-of-unbanned in Arena when they rolled out their Alchemy format. This format is specifically meant for Arena, and is filled with effects that would require an impartial mediator to oversee the match, such as adding a permanent +1/+1 to a random card in your hand without revealing it to your opponent. Additionally, many cards also got changes to make them more powerful and easier to use, while many others received changes meant to rein them in. In Familiar's case, it got an extra line of text that reads "This creature cannot block". While it still sees play in sacrifice-focused decks, its inability to chump-block huge threats means it's far from the powerhouse it used to be.
Alchemy’s fine, you can just *not* play it, like 90% or MTGA’s playerbase. A few Alchemy cards are just right for Singleton formats, that’s about as valuable as they can get for me. But Alchemy changes affecting Historic (even worse, Historic Brawl), is the stupidest, most absurd and uncalled for thing on Arena. Meathook Massacre is banned in standard, but you can still run it to its full potential in Standard Brawl. Yet, thanks to Alchemy, Meathook is nerfed to the ground in Historic Brawl, while the format is much more powerful than Standard Brawl…
@@bisonsama321 cauldron familiar was never a part of Alchemy. Alchemy came out after it had already rotated out of Standard. They made that change specifically to nerf it in Historic.
I'd love for you to do a video on the Four Horseman deck. It is a deck where all the cards are legal, but the deck can not actually be played without suffering slow play violations. It uses a non-deterministic combo and thus can't be shortcutted.
@@TheThiccestChungus It's a combo, so there's various tweaks that can be made to a deck that runs it, but it works like this: Basalt Monolith (Taps for 3 mana, has "3: Untap")+ Mesmeric Orb (When you Untap a card, mill 1), lets you mill infinitely at will. Emrakul, who, if it hits your graveyard, you shuffle your graveyard back into your library, so you don't mill out trying to get the combo. Then, you have to mill until you get 4 Narcomebas (A creature that, when milled, goes to the battlefield) Then, before you hit an Emrakul, mill: 1 dread return (Sorcery that, when in your graveyard, can be played by sacrificing 3 creatures, and puts a creature from the graveyard to the battlefield), 1 Sharuum the Hegemon (A creature that, on entering the battlefield, puts an artifact from graveyard to battlefield), and 1 Blasting Station (An artifact with "Tap, sac a creature: 1 damage to a target", and when a creature enters the battlefield, you Untap it). If you mill your Emrakul, you have to start this step again. With those 3 all in grave, Sac 3 Narcos to cast Dread Return to get Sharuum, which gets Blasting Station. Sac 4th Narco and Tap Blasting, deal 1 damage to your opponent, use Basalt+Mesmeric to mill until you hit Emrakul, shuffle grave back into library. Mill to get a Narco, Narco enters, untaps Blasting. Repeat, randomly milling an Emrakul so you don't mill out during this process, over and over until you've pinged your opponent for their entire life total. It takes Forever, and since it's randomized when you'll hit an Emrakul, it can't officially be declared a determined loop, so has to be manually played through every time. The Horsemen are the 4 Narcomebas, BTW.
@@karrotlord It effectively, Eventually, wins the game if you just get a 2 and 3 cost artifact into play. So there's definitely incentive, a 2 card instant win in colorless. Get the right rituals or Mana rocks and you could do it turn one.
The Four Horsemen combo is a fun example of a counterintuitive situation in probability theory where a 100% chance is not a guarantee. With unbounded time to play the game, your probability of winning once the mill loop starts becomes 100%, but there still are possible sequences of shuffles that do not win you the game. They're just 0% of the infinite possibility space because a smaller infinity divided by a larger infinity can become 0.
Krark Clan Ironworks was banned because most players don't actually know the proper procedure for paying costs. The minutia of those rules is difficult to explain to a casual player, so high level combo players look like they're just cheating. This is a problem for ALL mana abilities that involve moving cards around, but Krark Clan Ironworks was singled out because it was part of a top tier combo deck that became WAY more consistent when you knew exactly how to exploit the paying of costs and how it interacts with sacrificing permanents to pay them.
11:38 In the version of the urban legend I heard, the judge sidestepped the ruling entirely by disqualifying the first player for having a 59-card deck.
You can actually loop Shahrazad infinitely, leading to subgames within subgames within subgames [...] In the context of a subgame, all cards that are part of the main game are considered outside of the game, which means that if you play Shahrazad, you can use a Wish card (cards that take card from outside the game - usually meaning your sideboard - and puts them into your hand) to take cards from the main game into the subgame. This adds to the existing logistics nightmare of tracking the state of the main game (like damage, the stack, etc), but most notably this lets you grab the one card currently resolving in the main game: Shahrazad itself! With a bit of creative deckbuilding to keep lands and wishes in your library through the loop, you can keep starting subgames over and over...
You do need to worry about your library running out of cards as more and more are trapped in the layers above, but assuming you can loop wishes indefinitely, that might be okay. What part of the main game can wishes take cards from? Hand, library, battlefield, graveyard, stack?
you cannot loop indefinitely because you will leave non-zero cards behind and your deck is finite and there are not the options to pull more cards from the last game as you are playing in the current game.
@@TheJacklikesvideos I assume using leyline of anticipation/omniscience shenanigans there is a way to shape the gamestate so that a copy of Shahrazad is on the stack and all your cards are shuffled into your library, but that would be difficult to pull off indefinite subgames in a row unless your opponent is cooperating. You might also need to shuffle in their stuff too to prevent them from milling out. Now I'm curious if you can mill out during the first time state based actions are checked if your starting deck has less than 7 cards, or if you don't until your first draw step.
@@seandun7083 You don't need to worry too much about running out of cards yourself, you can just wish for the cards from the subgame to the subsubgame first, then shuffle them into the deck in some way. Or use lands that sacrifice themselves for mana + elixir or immortality to shuffle. However your opponent will likely end up with too few cards to draw an opening hand and lose the subgames as they start. When you're in the subgame, there is no concept of "main game" nor "zones outside the game". All those cards are treated just like your sideboard: outside the game. You can wish for a card from anywhere in the main game - except library, since it's part of the subgame - and that of course includes the stack ! Though let's be honest, should you manage to pull off such a loop, the opponent would just concede all subgames and lose half their life in the main game, skipping all the nonsense.
@@MrZerodaim I forgot that the main game library would be of course in your sub game library. I am curious how it works with face down exiled cards from the main game (for example if you're opponent casts Gonti). I have been digging in the rules and haven't been able to find anything clarifying that beyond just "stuff in the main game is outside the subgame". There is a concept of the main game in the subgame, but it only really matters for defining rules and for any effects of the card that created the subgame (like the life lots from Shahrazad upon resolution) but it is all outside the game, which I assume is what you were trying to say. I'm honestly surprised that they actually flushed out the rules as much as they did for a mechanic that is banned everywhere outside of unsets. Pro tip: if you are playing one of the silver bordered sub game cards and expect your opponents to play them too, Ass Whuppin' should be able to function to destroy stuff in the main game.
15:57 And even then, the un-set subgame cards all start with very low life totals. This means it's actually a lot more fun to do so and not as much of a slog as Shahrazad. The fact you don't even have to play seriously makes it more fun. Speaking of which, hope to see the top 10 un-set/acorn-stamped/silver-bordered cards that would be VERY overpowered in a normal game, excluding the eternal-legal ones.
I regard The Countdown is at One as the only subgame card that WoTC could make legal and people wouldn't complain because of how fast the outcome is. They would complain about the subgame being too fast. xD
Fun fact about Divine Intervention: This card can cause some wacky outcomes in the Emperor format due to its "spell range" rules, which are cited in DI's Oracle rulings. You can have a win, loss, and draw all in the same game.
That Lurrus card being so busted it gets banned from a format made for cards that are too busted to be played anywhere else is hilarious. It's also kind of funny that even though I don't play Magic, I can just look at some of the art for the cards and tell if they're really old or not. Wow, now I'm imagining someone using a banquet hall table so they can have their cards three feet apart from each just to play around Chaos Orb.
When it started, Magic was made by a company run out a guy’s garage, so they didn’t have much art direction and couldn’t pay their artists much. I heard that in the early days they got $50 in cash plus $50 in stock per piece, and they retained the copyright to their work. Since they weren’t getting paid all that much, artists weren’t always bringing their A game in those early sets. Ironically, for many of those artists, these are probably the best known pieces they’ve ever done.
@@drjohnwooberg I know two fun stories about early Magic art. Stasis was apparently a gift/favor from a Richard Garfield's aunt. It was free, I'm not sure if out of necessity or just as a way to feature her. Word of Command was painted by Jesper Myrfors, who directed Magic art for many years after. He painted a black background to use for an illustration, then drew two eyes as a joke. He wasn't planning on actually presenting that but Richard liked it and so it went to that card.
@@fernandobanda5734 Lol. I didn’t know that about either of those. I knew Birds of Paradise was originally supposed to be Volcanic Island, but the bird was more prominent in the art, so it became a creature card.
@@fernandobanda5734 I always liked the Stasis art. I think it invokes the work of some of the Surrealists and really gives you the sense that something weird is happening. The card was so annoying though. The Stasis deck was my first exposure to an "unfair" deck that wasn't even attempting to play the game in a normal way, and I hated it, lol.
Also a shout-out to cards like Invoke Prejudice and Cleanse. Banned from everywhere because, well, the names speak for themselves, and the art and text just makes it even worse
While some of the banned cards have questionable names, art and concept, a lot is just context and interpretation. Cleanse in my opinion is the most innocent and did absolutely nothing wrong.
Banned because some people cannot separate fantasy from reality. Those people would rather forget history than learn from it. (PS: A reply above my own got banned so UA-cam is still silencing some opinions, I expect.) (PPS: And now it's deleted. Beautiful going, UA-cam.)
Funniest one is the crusade card. There is a much more graphic and horrendous card called something like goblin crusade and it’s art depicts a gutted goblin crucified being used as a banner by soldiers yet it’s not banned
I love the idea of Shahrazad so much. As a former Yu-Gi-Oh player, that game didn’t have nearly as much fun getting impractical and whacky with card effects as MTG did.
Regarding Orcish Oriflamme, it would be later power-crept by Goblin Oriflamme for Modern Horizons, which had that card's misprint cost as its actual cost. And since it's made in modern Magic, it's clear the card is fine at that power level.
It’s a little weird that they thought the misprinted Oriflamme was too strong when Bad Moon, Crusade, and Lord of Atlantis were all also in Alpha. Maybe it’s because the other cards are symmetrical and require you to build around them a little more?
The chaos orb story was a early gencon from back in the day. I remember it and being paid to scout other players decks, make notes, then hustle back to my friend to give heads up on who had what hot cards. That was also when the great star trek power incident happened and a chair went out a window.. ahh those crazy days.
@@thanhavictus I.. have NO idea to be honest it was that long ago alas. I just remember the crapstorm when he did it and folks were just gobsmacked about it.
Honorable mention should go to Tibalt's Trickery which I talked about in your previous video where you mentioned about its ban, it wasn't banned due to its problematic win rate or effect. In fact it was pretty balanced in terms of win rate, it was banned cause its effect was so one-sided and usually meant an auto win for a deck that solely relied on the card to win the game if they got its effect off against yourself. Another honorable mention would be the cards that wizards said they can't talk about and don't want present at any event, that were made in an era of a different age that talked about slavery or other depictions of cruel acts that are not seen as favorable and offensive to some players. Quite a weird ban that literally meets the definition of weird.
@@QuantemDeconstructor I still don't see why that's a problem. We have cards called "Murder" and planeswalkers, as cards, that committed all kinds of atrocities, including genocide. It's a card game. Separating it from reality isn't that hard.
@@xXSamir44Xx I mean those cards do depict horrible things but Invoke Prejudice was literally racism put into a card, down to having Klansmen-esque figures representing it
@@QuantemDeconstructor of note to add onto Invoke Prejudice, it was illustrated by an actual Neo-Nazi. Same reason they haven't reused their art on any reprints, and they took certain cards out of 30th edition and the Lost Legends subset.
10:51 Just a second is a riff of split second. As split second prevents a player from casting or activating, just a second prevents players from physically moving a card.
With Shaharazad, if both players are playing 4 and 4 Forks you could, with the cards of the time, potentially end up in 8 layers of sub-games (with 1 sub-game suspended for each ready to start immediately upon the last finishing) and that does not even count the primary game. Not to mention that the ones activated within a sub-game are shuffled back into the deck at the end of it, so you potentially have to finish an absolutely colossal number of games before you finally get all of them into the graveyard within the original game, oh, and there is at least one card (Regrowth) around at the time that allows them to be pulled out of the graveyard... Yah, banning this one was probably inevitable.
@@RGC_animation I was noting that this is the maximum simultaneous number, cards on the stack don't carry over to the sub-games so 8 activations (with 8 more ready to immediately resolve in suspended games) is the maximum depth of a single chain of activations (with cards of the time, more might be possible now), but even more activations later in each game is still very possible. Even in Arabian Knights at least 24 activations in the main game are possible with Fork and Regrowth (with the number falling off with each sub-game in a stack and with each non-Fork generated activation), just not all as an onion of simultaneous sub-sub-games.
Nexus of Fate got banned specifically on arena because people made games go on infinitely against streamers, and Wizards can't program a timer to prevent it. :(
Cauldron familiar with witches oven was such a fun broken deck before it got banned in standard. Also scute swarm breaks arena wayyy worse when you have it trigger 150+ times.
Conquistador of the Golden Land limited to 1 in Master Duel comes to mind as a very strange not quite ban to Hit Eldlich. For gambling cards to be banned they need to exist in the first place. If they had printed some, they would've had to ban them later too.
Be careful about that language there, “gamble card” actually has a meaning in YuGiOh, which is any card with an effect that has an outcome determined by a coin flip or die roll (d6)
Wait until you hear about Frankie Peanuts, which already helped players sent their own opponents to the Shadow Realm (read - kill themselves or be disqualified due to breaking the game rules) much better than YGO ever did.
Rukh Egg was banned because at the time, there were no play or draw rules. So you could simply draw your 8, discard to 7, throw the Rukh away, and boom. You've got a big nasty flyer to start turn 2 with. The Bazaar was barely worth anything because people were looking for the Library of Alexandria, and discard strategies didn't start to get explored until 1995/1996.
I'm also going to mention a weird ban for a weird reason: Bridge from Below was banned because Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis was to powerful. A card that had seen very little serious play in modern, only played in a low tier niche deck got banned because one of the most powerful creatures to be legal in the modern format was printed. Yes, I'm still salty about that. And no, I will not yield until this atrocious mistake is fixed by WotC.
The secret text of Shahrazad is WW all opponents lose half their life rounded down. It's never a time sink unless an opponent decides for it to be, they can just concede the subgame.
Another good addition to the list would be the number of cards that have been temporarily banned because of glitches on MTGO like the one that causes peoples games to crash (I forget the actual card)
I just noticed. Technically the entire subgame happens during the turn you activate Shahrazad... Gods. EDIT: for those unaware, there is a mechanic in Magic called Storm, wich copies the spell that has it on cast, as many times as spells you have used that turn, and every spell used during the subgames count as being casted on the turn Shahrazad is activated. It's trivial to get literally infinite subgames from that interaction. Also shoutouts to Floral Spuzzum, wich in it's original incarnation, required THE CARD ITSELF to somehow decide wether or not it wanted to activate it's effects. Since unfortunately sentient cards aren't a thing yet in real life, it was eventually fixed to require the PLAYER that activated it to decide instead.
@@joanaguayoplanell4912 This particular issue wouldn't be a problem. Rule 725.1b states that no effects in the subgame (including number of spells played) may have an effect on the main game unless the effect that created the subgame says so.
Adding to the companions banned for weird reasons. Lutri, the Spellchaser was banned in Commander the day it was spoiled because it's companion restriction is just the normal rules of Commander.
Magic: Commander, the 100 card format, is our most popular format, and people love it! Also Magic: 80 cards is too many for the tiny baby hands of anyone playing magic. There's no way anyone could reasonable shuffle more than 60 cards, so we banned yorion.
Divine Intervention: Don't forget that in those days, playing for Ante was a thing. If you weren't going to win the game, and didn't want to lose your ante card, a draw is the only viable option.
Another thing with Shahrazad is that it has some very wild and confusing interactions when you start adding in cards that interact with 'cards outside the game' like Burning Wish, basically twisting the game logic into knots and creating a theoretical nightmare for judges I imagine another reason that Chaos Orb/Falling Star is banned is that a popular way to play Legacy/Vintage is through the MTG Online client and how do you replicate that card effect in digital?
Legacy and Vintage in paper and digital are not completely in sync anyway, though. There are many old cards that aren't there because they are obnoxious to program and not relevant to the metagame.
@@QuantemDeconstructor Because one is an original name, the other is a misspelling of an already existent name that's historically relevant enough that it's even in my phone's autocorrect.
I honestly love it when upstart card games take random broken effects and print them on cards regardless of how stupid it might be. Something like Chaos Orb or Shahrazad in Magic and stuff like Fiber Jar and Victory Dragon in Yugioh are pretty good reasons to play card games.
I'm curious, what were you supposed to do with the cards that were already on the field when Shaharazad was played? Were you supposed to leave them there, or stack them up and put them aside? Depending on the answer, table space might have been a bigger concern than time for tournament organizers/card shop staff.
They stay in the main game so yes table space becomes a problem pretty quickly. And even worse - cards like Living Wish and Burning Wish can pull cards from the main game into the sub game, creating a huge headache for remembering what was where (you have to put everything back once the sub game is over). And yes this includes using Burning Wish during the sub-game to grab the copy of Shahrazad that is currently on the stack in the main game waiting to resolve.
I used to run a Shaharizad deck, i built on a dare, in my casual group. One game I put 8 copies of Shaharizad on the stack. We played played it out. The game took 7 hours.
In the very early days of magic there wasn't a rule stating a maximum number of copies of cards you could play in a deck, and one strategy was to play a deck entirely full of balances and mox pearls, leading to some pretty silly games. As a result you, could argue, every card was restricted to a maximum of 4 copies excluding basic lands. Pretty weird to think about these days.
There was also a deck from that time that was only copies of Channel and Fireball along with mox+lotus+ancestral recall. It was rare that the deck didn't kill on turn 1, in a time when Force of Will didn't exist yet.
@@jasonslade6259 there was also a mono blue deck based around drawing a ton of cards with braingeyser, hurkyl's recalling for a bunch more mana, and then milling out the opponents entire deck with another braingeyser
All that about Orcish Oriflamme, but no mention of Goblin Oriflamme, which is a straight-up power creep version that really does cost 1R. Also, I used to joke with my friends about building a deck with 4 Shahrazads, 4 Karn Liberated, and 1 Divine Intervention to make the most soul-crushing play sequence ever of subgame, subgame, restart the game, subgame, draw.
The companion mechanic is literally going to haunt WotC for the rest of eternity. I wonder if it will eventually become the second mechanic to receive an 11 on the storm scale? (It's at a 9 right now)
Ante was a neat idea, because it acted as kind of like chess ratings: if your cards were much better than your opponent's cards, then you would likely be anteing a more valuable card as well. But in practice, it's impractical and not fun.
Modern Yorion decks run upwards of 20 fetchlands. They often shuffle every turn. Add to that the fact that in tournaments, you are required to present your deck so your opponent can also shuffle or cut it every time you shuffle your deck, and it definitely slows things down. (Also tournaments have to complete 3 games in 50 minutes) Oh, and Yorion was also causing other issues already: - Yorion decks often homogenized into value piles. - When Yorion was actually played, it led to unfun gamestates (sometimes involving flickerwisp to keep looping it).
Sensei's Divining Top was banned in part because it made turns longer, by giving the player more choices overall, and leading to longer decision-making throughout the entire game (especially since it's almost impossible to destroy)
Surprised at the lack of time vault and Flash: Only cards that has been banned, unbanned after erratas, and then even stronger after erratas and being banned.
In 1998, while judging a Type-1 (Vintage) tournament, one of the players managed to cast Shahrazad three times during the same game. We had to wait the extra eighty for this table to finish before we could continue with the tournament. Pretty annoying. Fortunately, the storyteller deck (we called it) didn't continute onto the quarterfinals. Nevertheless, the card was also in my "Bad Karma" deck for the longest time also strictly for pissing people off... I can totally see why it needed to be banned.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Yorion's utility as pitch fodder for a free Solitude or Force of Negation. Ironically, the change to the companion rule that nerfed Lurrus in Vintage may have made Yorion stronger in Modern.
If it wasnt banned due to ante, Contract from Below would have a compelling case for most powerful card ever printed. Forget Ancestral Recall- this one allows you to draw a new hand for just 1 mana. Having to ante a card would be meaningless since you were not likely to lose after resolving it.
Unofficial number 11: Crusade It’s a an enchantment for two white mana whose effect is: “All white creatures get +1/+1” You can probably tell why this card was banned. Not only is this card banned in Legacy, Vintage and Commander; Scryfall intentionally hides the card art on their database and doesn’t provide links to TCGplayer or Cardmarket.
Jihad is also a card banned in that off-putting batch of magic banned cards... And if wotc wanted to score woke points by banning those, magic's interpretation of jihad is actually one of the rare interpretations of the word by westerners that doesn't involve suicide bombing, so it should've been fine...
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the rules, but Contract from Below has the issue that it would be a 4x staple in any Legacy or Vintage deck if it was playable as it is. Because if I understand it correctly it is a part of your deck, so it counts toward your minimum deck size, but removes itself as an effect when the game starts, meaning you are playing with a more consistent deck. Even limited at 1, it turns them in 59 cards deck. It's not as insane as the actual effect, but wizards still wouldn't want it.
I like the Ante System. Reminds me of the Old School Magic Book "Arena", which is my favorite of Magic Books (with Planeshift, Nemesis, and Chainer's Torment being close behind). When "Fighters" lost a spell match, they'd lose one Spell to the opponent, or in a Death Match the opponent would take their whole Satchel of Spell Amulets minus a Mana Tribute to "The Walker" that ruled that Plane. It was a Great Book and I'd love to see a Garth One-Eye Legendary card.
I found one card that was banned that fits this list perfectly, I can't remember what it's called but the effect is "Destroy all black creatures", you can probably guess why it was banned.
The only bans are: -Ante cards -Dexterity cards -Shahrazad (the only subgame card) -Conspiracy cards: These were created for a specific Limited format and don't really work in Constructed because they have zero opportunity cost. -Cards that were banned recently for having offensive names or art Lurrus is the only card to ever have been banned for power reasons, that's why it was a big deal. After the companion nerf, it's now legal again.
Our FLGS had one employee who had a deck in the early years in case anyone every offered to play for ante, allowed to be dusted off only for someone who the owner never wanted to walk into the store again. It contained 4 Scheherazade (groan) and every ante card, and was around a 120 card deck. The concept was simply to cause your opponent to ante more cards than they had in their deck, with 4 ways of creating games within games. It didn't actually set him back that much at the time since no one actually liked ante and would never play it. As far as I know it was only used in test games as a joke though, it was never actually used to steal someone's deck, just a demonstration of why ante was a terrible idea.
I think a good inclusion would be Memory Jar. As far as I know it is still the only card that was banned in an emergency. It was already Combo Winter during Urza's block and things would have only gotten worse with this card
I Yugioh there's a few cards which if you win the game using, the the effect is that you win the entre set. They got banned not because they were too powerful, but because the card was considered to promote poor tournament etiquette. In Yugioh you're allowed to concede the game at any point. So if you saw that you were about to lose to this card, you could concede before its effect goes off to prevent it.
I used to play a golgari cat oven deck on arena while it was still in standard. Never even realized it got banned, probably because I didn't play much after a while. But I also remember briefly coming back to the game after it rotated out, and it was still legal in historic, which I don't remember if the format even existed before my first hiatus. I haven't touched it again since, long time even before alchemy, which I will never play because screw having to relearn effects of existing cards when they get rebalanced.
That Cauldron FAmiliar thing is worse online too cos not only are you forcefully passing priority back and forth, your opponent is likely doing some kind of infinite combo with it. So you're not doing this once per turn. Unless you concede, you're probably gonna spend the next 5 minutes just passing priority. You'd stop playing Arena right then and therre.
An honor roll mention probably could be the Sensei's Divining Top ban in legacy...it was banned for making the games take too long in legacy because of top's interaction with counterbalance
Shahrazad is also notable for being one of the cards illustrated by Kaja Foglio, currently known for her and her husband Phil's webcomic _Girl Genius._
I still have my deck with 4 Shahrazad (with Panoptic Mirrors and other copy effects) and a Divine Intervention. Also ran a bunch of effects to remove cards from the game, as at the time I made it, cards removed in the sub game stayed removed.
Chaos orb: I think the followup joke was the guy lost the match cause immediately after he ripped up his card he was deck checked and was playing with an illegal deck short one card of the minimum.
It's weird that Cauldron Familiar was banned in standard because of Arena because it is currently in alchemy, which is the Arena-exclusive version of standard.
Rukh Egg without errata today would not hit the board from mill or discard, because the rules text is only active on the battlefield unless otherwise stated or implied (a stated example would be panglacial wurm, which reads "this card from your library." an implied example would be madness, which is a discard trigger. since cards are discarded from the hand, it would be meaningless if it were not active there.). for the unintended effect of Rukh to be actual under modern comprehensive rules, it would have to intended with the explicit text "enters the graveyard from anywhere." as a side note to old formatting and all this, there were instances where they misworded discard instead of sacrifice, so in another reality madness would have been confusing.
This is just hypothetical though. "When ~ is put into a graveyard" period doesn't exist in any card, there's no precedent to say that it would or wouldn't work. Abilities implicitly work "how they should" when moving or checking a zone, just like how Bloodghast's ability only works in the graveyard *because* it mentions it returning from the graveyard.
to talk about aetherworks marvel they didn't ban that card first, they banned Emrakul promised end because before banning aetherworks the deck had eight copies of huge elderazi issues which made it much more than 10% of just winning on turn four. So to not shut down the deck entirely they just decided to remove one of the bigger threats. That threat being the almost untouchable (in both spells and blocks) flying spaghetti monster. Not only that you got to take their turn and just remove whatever creature they may of have into a bad attack as well. though while they never unbanned Emrakul after the Marvel ban, I'm sure most players were fine with it due to the fact that it's unfun to see your opponent play YOUR deck and force unfavorable actions upon you. (plus the fact it pushed midrange decks out with it's Pro Instants)
It got _three_ spiritual successors in Neon Dynasty. A freak's idea of Justice (white) can devolve into or involve prejudice, and Despair and Calamity (red and black) are likely byproducts of - again - prejudice. IDFK how that cycle made it into Neon Dynasty. Ironically enough, though, The Winds (blue) is one of the two safe cards in the cycle.
@@RaceBandit Those at least are.. vague enough not to cause any problems. Invoke Prejudice on the other hand literally looks and reads like a group of klansmen at a cross burning.
@@RaceBandit Not seeing how that cycle has anything to do with Invoke Prejudice, beyond having 4 of the same color in the cost and having the word "invoke' in the title. Are you suggesting that word is racist?
If you do 4 copies of Shahrazad and 4 copies of Nefarious Lich as they all stack on each other, you end up with the equivalent of "I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream"
shoutout to all the cards banned like last year for being offensive, which unironically gave the cards more attention than they'd seen in years (because they're unplayably bad)
15:00 ... I've been since Alpha and I once played a subgame of Shahrazad in a subgame of Shahrazad. The card was banned in our local play group that day.
Speaking of banned cards, you should do a video on Oracle of the Alpha. It was just recently put out as a digital only card. For 3 mana you get a 2/3 Bird Wizard with Flying. Every time it attacks you scry 1. When it enters the battlefield you conjure the Power Nine into your deck. Time Walk, Black Lotus, Timetwister, Ancestral Recall, and all of the Mox gems are now legal in Historic because of it.
It's not actually that powerful because the power of the power 9 comes from the fact that you could have multiples of them in your starting hand enabling you explosive turn ones that determine the game. Oracle of the alpha is a three drop creature, which is why it's not as powerful
a yet further reason that Shahrazad was banned: when a game goes to time, technically speaking you're supposed to play five more turns - finish the current turn, then the next four (two for each player). So. If you cast Shahrazad, and then while resolving the subgame, the game goes to time, it's four more turns in the subgame before everything ends in a draw, right? Wrong. Because you're TECHNICALLY still in the middle of resolving Shahrazad, you have to *completely finish the subgame* to even finish the FIRST turn of "going to time". Add on the fact that back when Shahrazad was new, the "four-of rule" hadn't been added yet, and so there was a very real worry of people showing up to tournaments with decks consisting of nothing but Plains and Shahrazad, nesting subgames upon subgames upon subgames that would take hours to complete A TURN, let alone a full game? Yeah, Shahrazad got banned and banned hard.
Cauldron familiar is just straight up broken. It's shown in every winrate metric. The card singlehandedly removes combat from your opponent and with devil it's an autowin mode. The combo was the best deck in historic for a long time (now nerfed) and is still a major player in pioneer. In standard there wasn't much you can do against it. Plus it's also way too good with trail of crumbs.
Divine Intervention would be a cool card if it read, "If there are no Intervention counters, if you would ever lose the game, it's a draw instead". That would actually be a Divine Intervention..
I’m guessing the “too many triggers” thing was also why they created the Toxic mechanic for All Will Be One. I’m pretty sure it’s literally just Poisonous, but not a triggered ability
I wonder how unbanning ante cards could alter eternal formats. After all, while they wouldn't use their ante-related effects, they would remove themselves from the deck meaning that they basicaly thin your deck by themselves. If you played a 60 card deck with 53 ante cards. You would have a guaranteed 7 card starting hand... which would be degenerate. Maybe that could be fixed by only allowing a few ante cards to be legal for 56, 52 or 48 card decks, making them a more litteral "reduce your deck size by X" than Upstart f cking Goblin from yu-gi-oh. That would be wild
I informally did that back in the mid 90's. We had "non serious" decks (really, none of our decks were good) that we didn't mind losing cards from, so they were stacked with all the bulky stuff that dealt with ante. Contract was the best of course. But the funny thing is that it did change things if you removed all them - the deck went to 52 cards or so, so about 10% more consistency on drawing what you needed.
When a card said that you should remove it from your deck if you're not playing for ante, it was BEFORE presenting your deck, like a deck building restriction. It doesn't mean "exile this at the beginning of the game".
There are only nine cards with the Ante mechanic. Which makes a total of 36 total for a deck. But how could you unban them whilst not using the mechanic? It’s a nonsensical proposition.
Nexus of fate should definitely be on the list, it was banned only on magic arena and only in bo1(standard was the only constructed format on arena at the time) the reason for it's banning was that back then you wouldn't time out like today so if the game reached a point where only Nexus is in your library it was possible to cast it infinitely (or until the opponent concede).
The ban on marvel was sound mine won like 70 to 90% of the time even against bad matchups, and yorion was banned to curb control decks (people hate control especially good control shells when I counter a spell turn 1-2 I usually get a scoop on arena) which is also why they didn't give us an esper triome.
Second Sunrise, Faith's Reward and Sensei's Divining Top - all banned for time reasons, the first two specifically because of the "eggs" deck, the last just for slowing down the game in gereral
Wait wait wait. So you're saying there was cards with an effect of throwing the card up high and one that make subgames??? Man, Magic was chaotic back then.
The more important question about divine intervention isn't about it being banned. Its about why wotc decided it was a good idea to print a card with the phrase "the game is a draw" on it.
Wizards- Bans Yorion because it could be “problematic” to shuffle 80 cards
Also Wizards- Supports a 100 card format
Sharazad might be the best example of a major flavor win making a card totally unplayable lol
i don't know man, there's a few stall decks that i can think of in modern and legacy that would kill to have 4 copies specifically to get the best theoretical opener. Then you run Echo of Eons with some graveyard recursion and you're golden.
Sharazad is terrible if you want to win the game, but the potential for stalling and playing the clock is insane. Without any copy or recursion effect, if you manage to cast every copy in your deck every subgame you'll have to play 16 games in total
4 3 2 1 0
3 2 1 0 2 1 0 1 0 0
2 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0
1 0 0 0 0
0
Note on Lurrus:
It only restricts permanent spells (for some reason) so you can still play expensive instants and sorceries with Lurrus as your commander.
This lead to a lot of legacy decks making no changes whatsoever and just adding it, while still playing force of will.
This made me think of the story about the play-tester who prevented Time Walk from being printed with the wording "opponent loses next turn" because he pointed out how else that could be interpreted.
? I don't get it.
@@RGC_animation "Loses" can also mean loses the game.
@@RGC_animation time walk: take an extra turn after this one.
There are also other wordings you could use.
Your opponent skips their next turn.
But you could write it as "your opponent loses (their) next turn.
That would mean some guy in some tournament would argue that he understands it not as" you get an extra turn" but "your opponent loses the game"
Target player loses next turn can just mean the game itself since this was 1993, there wasn't a way to clarify wording like that at the time. Take an extra turn is understood because both players take turns back and forth normally.
One really important thing about Familiar is the fact that "sacrifice a creature" is part of the Oven's cost, not the effect. Costs don't go on the stack - they resolve instantly. So if you use a removal spell on the cat, its controller can just sacrifice it to the Oven and you can't respond. So the easiest way you'd shut down this combo - exiling the cat - doesn't work, because it's never going to be on the battlefield with the oven tapped.
The claim that it generated too many triggers and made people pass priority too often on Arena seems like BS, though. There are SO MANY cards and combos that cause that kind of thing. The thing that really needs fixing on Arena is how auto-pass works. They just need a button or keyboard shortcut that lets you pass until the end of the phase no matter what happens, or something like that.
The idea that you basically yeet your cat into the oven after someone says you're not allowed to have it is horrific and hilarious to me.
It's worth noting that the cat's own templating also doubles as protection the other way around, rendering it all but effectively impervious to effects attempting to exile it from the owner's graveyard due to the 0 mana activation cost and instant speed capacity to return to the battlefield. Unless the cat player somehow literally only has one food token to sac and the opponent is ready with a spell in response on the spot, cards like Cling to Dust or Soul-Guide lantern that were literally intended to function as countermeasures against graveyard strategies in the same standard format were unlikely to succeed at stopping a Cauldron Familiar in all but the most ideal circumstances.
What happend to “as an additional cost to…”? tapping and mana payment (both represent symbolically) as well as pay x life (because it says pay) make sense as parts of cost, other things don’t and therefor realy should have that written to be easier for new players to understand. So it would be for the oven:
[tap symbol] as an additional cost to activating this ability sacrefice a creature. Create a food token, if the creatures toughness was at least 4 create two of those tokens instead.
@@algotkristoffersson15 An "additional cost" doesn't go on the stack either, so that wouldn't change the fact that the cat being sacrificed is faster than anything the opponent can do.
@@GiganticPawUnit no but it would make it easier to tell that that is the case, scince it being a cost wouldn’t be hidden behind a single, easy for new players to miss symbol but rather spelled out clearly, meaning understanding it just requires knowledge of the basic rules, rather than also a easy once you learn it but difficult to learn formatting guideline.
As a yugioh player, having the card game makers just ban a bad strategy because it’s unfun is something I want to preach to Konami
Dont like playing against mystic mine?
@@IEpixlyFail Play OCG lmao
They banned self-destruct button because it's an abuseable stall decks, that they can retry the game until either the playe rans out of game or you succeed using a slow OTK card.
@Nyx Assassin I dont really enjoy playing yugioh that much, just like seeing how much more broken it is than mtg lol
Eh... some of these MtG bans for me looks like WoTC is even worse than Konami at balancing the game....
Fun fact about Cauldron Familiar: It actually got sort-of-unbanned in Arena when they rolled out their Alchemy format. This format is specifically meant for Arena, and is filled with effects that would require an impartial mediator to oversee the match, such as adding a permanent +1/+1 to a random card in your hand without revealing it to your opponent. Additionally, many cards also got changes to make them more powerful and easier to use, while many others received changes meant to rein them in. In Familiar's case, it got an extra line of text that reads "This creature cannot block". While it still sees play in sacrifice-focused decks, its inability to chump-block huge threats means it's far from the powerhouse it used to be.
Alchemy sucks
Alchemy’s fine, you can just *not* play it, like 90% or MTGA’s playerbase. A few Alchemy cards are just right for Singleton formats, that’s about as valuable as they can get for me.
But Alchemy changes affecting Historic (even worse, Historic Brawl), is the stupidest, most absurd and uncalled for thing on Arena.
Meathook Massacre is banned in standard, but you can still run it to its full potential in Standard Brawl. Yet, thanks to Alchemy, Meathook is nerfed to the ground in Historic Brawl, while the format is much more powerful than Standard Brawl…
@@bisonsama321 cauldron familiar was never a part of Alchemy. Alchemy came out after it had already rotated out of Standard. They made that change specifically to nerf it in Historic.
We don't talk about the fake cards.
@@bisonsama321 Oracle of the Alpha also just released and is digital only. That card should stay in Alchemy and not bring Time Walk into historic
I'd love for you to do a video on the Four Horseman deck. It is a deck where all the cards are legal, but the deck can not actually be played without suffering slow play violations. It uses a non-deterministic combo and thus can't be shortcutted.
Can you link the deck?
@@TheThiccestChungus It's a combo, so there's various tweaks that can be made to a deck that runs it, but it works like this:
Basalt Monolith (Taps for 3 mana, has "3: Untap")+ Mesmeric Orb (When you Untap a card, mill 1), lets you mill infinitely at will.
Emrakul, who, if it hits your graveyard, you shuffle your graveyard back into your library, so you don't mill out trying to get the combo.
Then, you have to mill until you get 4 Narcomebas (A creature that, when milled, goes to the battlefield)
Then, before you hit an Emrakul, mill: 1 dread return (Sorcery that, when in your graveyard, can be played by sacrificing 3 creatures, and puts a creature from the graveyard to the battlefield), 1 Sharuum the Hegemon (A creature that, on entering the battlefield, puts an artifact from graveyard to battlefield), and 1 Blasting Station (An artifact with "Tap, sac a creature: 1 damage to a target", and when a creature enters the battlefield, you Untap it).
If you mill your Emrakul, you have to start this step again.
With those 3 all in grave, Sac 3 Narcos to cast Dread Return to get Sharuum, which gets Blasting Station.
Sac 4th Narco and Tap Blasting, deal 1 damage to your opponent, use Basalt+Mesmeric to mill until you hit Emrakul, shuffle grave back into library.
Mill to get a Narco, Narco enters, untaps Blasting.
Repeat, randomly milling an Emrakul so you don't mill out during this process, over and over until you've pinged your opponent for their entire life total.
It takes Forever, and since it's randomized when you'll hit an Emrakul, it can't officially be declared a determined loop, so has to be manually played through every time.
The Horsemen are the 4 Narcomebas, BTW.
@@calemr Good time for the saying "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
@@karrotlord It effectively, Eventually, wins the game if you just get a 2 and 3 cost artifact into play.
So there's definitely incentive, a 2 card instant win in colorless.
Get the right rituals or Mana rocks and you could do it turn one.
The Four Horsemen combo is a fun example of a counterintuitive situation in probability theory where a 100% chance is not a guarantee. With unbounded time to play the game, your probability of winning once the mill loop starts becomes 100%, but there still are possible sequences of shuffles that do not win you the game. They're just 0% of the infinite possibility space because a smaller infinity divided by a larger infinity can become 0.
Krark Clan Ironworks was banned because most players don't actually know the proper procedure for paying costs. The minutia of those rules is difficult to explain to a casual player, so high level combo players look like they're just cheating. This is a problem for ALL mana abilities that involve moving cards around, but Krark Clan Ironworks was singled out because it was part of a top tier combo deck that became WAY more consistent when you knew exactly how to exploit the paying of costs and how it interacts with sacrificing permanents to pay them.
KCI feels like exactly the kind of card sims and CCGs were built for, and who's Cardinal sin was being in a physical TCG
11:38 In the version of the urban legend I heard, the judge sidestepped the ruling entirely by disqualifying the first player for having a 59-card deck.
Logically, it's marking your card.
In a version I heard, he got DQed for playing a marked card.
Lol the version i heard was the guy got DQd for illegally modifying his deck.
You can actually loop Shahrazad infinitely, leading to subgames within subgames within subgames [...]
In the context of a subgame, all cards that are part of the main game are considered outside of the game, which means that if you play Shahrazad, you can use a Wish card (cards that take card from outside the game - usually meaning your sideboard - and puts them into your hand) to take cards from the main game into the subgame.
This adds to the existing logistics nightmare of tracking the state of the main game (like damage, the stack, etc), but most notably this lets you grab the one card currently resolving in the main game: Shahrazad itself! With a bit of creative deckbuilding to keep lands and wishes in your library through the loop, you can keep starting subgames over and over...
You do need to worry about your library running out of cards as more and more are trapped in the layers above, but assuming you can loop wishes indefinitely, that might be okay.
What part of the main game can wishes take cards from? Hand, library, battlefield, graveyard, stack?
you cannot loop indefinitely because you will leave non-zero cards behind and your deck is finite and there are not the options to pull more cards from the last game as you are playing in the current game.
@@TheJacklikesvideos I assume using leyline of anticipation/omniscience shenanigans there is a way to shape the gamestate so that a copy of Shahrazad is on the stack and all your cards are shuffled into your library, but that would be difficult to pull off indefinite subgames in a row unless your opponent is cooperating. You might also need to shuffle in their stuff too to prevent them from milling out.
Now I'm curious if you can mill out during the first time state based actions are checked if your starting deck has less than 7 cards, or if you don't until your first draw step.
@@seandun7083 You don't need to worry too much about running out of cards yourself, you can just wish for the cards from the subgame to the subsubgame first, then shuffle them into the deck in some way. Or use lands that sacrifice themselves for mana + elixir or immortality to shuffle. However your opponent will likely end up with too few cards to draw an opening hand and lose the subgames as they start.
When you're in the subgame, there is no concept of "main game" nor "zones outside the game". All those cards are treated just like your sideboard: outside the game. You can wish for a card from anywhere in the main game - except library, since it's part of the subgame - and that of course includes the stack !
Though let's be honest, should you manage to pull off such a loop, the opponent would just concede all subgames and lose half their life in the main game, skipping all the nonsense.
@@MrZerodaim I forgot that the main game library would be of course in your sub game library. I am curious how it works with face down exiled cards from the main game (for example if you're opponent casts Gonti). I have been digging in the rules and haven't been able to find anything clarifying that beyond just "stuff in the main game is outside the subgame".
There is a concept of the main game in the subgame, but it only really matters for defining rules and for any effects of the card that created the subgame (like the life lots from Shahrazad upon resolution) but it is all outside the game, which I assume is what you were trying to say.
I'm honestly surprised that they actually flushed out the rules as much as they did for a mechanic that is banned everywhere outside of unsets.
Pro tip: if you are playing one of the silver bordered sub game cards and expect your opponents to play them too, Ass Whuppin' should be able to function to destroy stuff in the main game.
15:57 And even then, the un-set subgame cards all start with very low life totals. This means it's actually a lot more fun to do so and not as much of a slog as Shahrazad. The fact you don't even have to play seriously makes it more fun.
Speaking of which, hope to see the top 10 un-set/acorn-stamped/silver-bordered cards that would be VERY overpowered in a normal game, excluding the eternal-legal ones.
And seeing as it’s a red spell, that sub game is likely to end really fast with a lightning bolt or something.
@@enlongjones2394 Yup. Very fast.
For certain, I hope a new un-set makes a new subgame card for white.
I regard The Countdown is at One as the only subgame card that WoTC could make legal and people wouldn't complain because of how fast the outcome is. They would complain about the subgame being too fast. xD
Fun fact about Divine Intervention: This card can cause some wacky outcomes in the Emperor format due to its "spell range" rules, which are cited in DI's Oracle rulings. You can have a win, loss, and draw all in the same game.
That Lurrus card being so busted it gets banned from a format made for cards that are too busted to be played anywhere else is hilarious. It's also kind of funny that even though I don't play Magic, I can just look at some of the art for the cards and tell if they're really old or not.
Wow, now I'm imagining someone using a banquet hall table so they can have their cards three feet apart from each just to play around Chaos Orb.
When it started, Magic was made by a company run out a guy’s garage, so they didn’t have much art direction and couldn’t pay their artists much. I heard that in the early days they got $50 in cash plus $50 in stock per piece, and they retained the copyright to their work. Since they weren’t getting paid all that much, artists weren’t always bringing their A game in those early sets. Ironically, for many of those artists, these are probably the best known pieces they’ve ever done.
@@drjohnwooberg I know two fun stories about early Magic art.
Stasis was apparently a gift/favor from a Richard Garfield's aunt. It was free, I'm not sure if out of necessity or just as a way to feature her.
Word of Command was painted by Jesper Myrfors, who directed Magic art for many years after. He painted a black background to use for an illustration, then drew two eyes as a joke. He wasn't planning on actually presenting that but Richard liked it and so it went to that card.
@@fernandobanda5734 Lol. I didn’t know that about either of those. I knew Birds of Paradise was originally supposed to be Volcanic Island, but the bird was more prominent in the art, so it became a creature card.
@@fernandobanda5734 I always liked the Stasis art. I think it invokes the work of some of the Surrealists and really gives you the sense that something weird is happening. The card was so annoying though. The Stasis deck was my first exposure to an "unfair" deck that wasn't even attempting to play the game in a normal way, and I hated it, lol.
Also a shout-out to cards like Invoke Prejudice and Cleanse. Banned from everywhere because, well, the names speak for themselves, and the art and text just makes it even worse
Banned because of the woke indoctrination of the west then
While some of the banned cards have questionable names, art and concept, a lot is just context and interpretation. Cleanse in my opinion is the most innocent and did absolutely nothing wrong.
Banned because some people cannot separate fantasy from reality.
Those people would rather forget history than learn from it.
(PS: A reply above my own got banned so UA-cam is still silencing some opinions, I expect.)
(PPS: And now it's deleted. Beautiful going, UA-cam.)
Funniest one is the crusade card. There is a much more graphic and horrendous card called something like goblin crusade and it’s art depicts a gutted goblin crucified being used as a banner by soldiers yet it’s not banned
@@acksawblack Also they never banned another card after because of said reasons. It really comes off as a virtual signal.
I love the idea of Shahrazad so much. As a former Yu-Gi-Oh player, that game didn’t have nearly as much fun getting impractical and whacky with card effects as MTG did.
I loved Convulsion of Nature back in the day. :)
@@fernandobanda5734 I remember that card making me super hopeful that the game would do more fun, niche antics someday. Sigh 🥲
It's ironic how MtG can send you to the Shadow Realm in a much more practical way than YGO ever could (Frankie Peanuts).
Regarding Orcish Oriflamme, it would be later power-crept by Goblin Oriflamme for Modern Horizons, which had that card's misprint cost as its actual cost. And since it's made in modern Magic, it's clear the card is fine at that power level.
It’s a little weird that they thought the misprinted Oriflamme was too strong when Bad Moon, Crusade, and Lord of Atlantis were all also in Alpha. Maybe it’s because the other cards are symmetrical and require you to build around them a little more?
@@drjohnwooberg different thoughts back then.
Thought creatures were too good. Now, some of them were too good.
The chaos orb story was a early gencon from back in the day. I remember it and being paid to scout other players decks, make notes, then hustle back to my friend to give heads up on who had what hot cards. That was also when the great star trek power incident happened and a chair went out a window.. ahh those crazy days.
So when a player ripped up his chaos orb, was he allowed to put a new one in?
@@thanhavictus I.. have NO idea to be honest it was that long ago alas. I just remember the crapstorm when he did it and folks were just gobsmacked about it.
Honorable mention should go to Tibalt's Trickery which I talked about in your previous video where you mentioned about its ban, it wasn't banned due to its problematic win rate or effect. In fact it was pretty balanced in terms of win rate, it was banned cause its effect was so one-sided and usually meant an auto win for a deck that solely relied on the card to win the game if they got its effect off against yourself.
Another honorable mention would be the cards that wizards said they can't talk about and don't want present at any event, that were made in an era of a different age that talked about slavery or other depictions of cruel acts that are not seen as favorable and offensive to some players. Quite a weird ban that literally meets the definition of weird.
Ah, the incredibly perplexing nature of how they thought it was ok to print Invoke Prejudice
@@QuantemDeconstructor I still don't see why that's a problem. We have cards called "Murder" and planeswalkers, as cards, that committed all kinds of atrocities, including genocide. It's a card game. Separating it from reality isn't that hard.
@@xXSamir44Xx I mean those cards do depict horrible things but Invoke Prejudice was literally racism put into a card, down to having Klansmen-esque figures representing it
@@QuantemDeconstructor of note to add onto Invoke Prejudice, it was illustrated by an actual Neo-Nazi. Same reason they haven't reused their art on any reprints, and they took certain cards out of 30th edition and the Lost Legends subset.
@@AirRideMaster yeah it's subject matter that hits too close to home, also holy shit
10:51 Just a second is a riff of split second. As split second prevents a player from casting or activating, just a second prevents players from physically moving a card.
I remember that Zodiac Dragon had a similar issue like the one Rukh Egg had.
With Shaharazad, if both players are playing 4 and 4 Forks you could, with the cards of the time, potentially end up in 8 layers of sub-games (with 1 sub-game suspended for each ready to start immediately upon the last finishing) and that does not even count the primary game. Not to mention that the ones activated within a sub-game are shuffled back into the deck at the end of it, so you potentially have to finish an absolutely colossal number of games before you finally get all of them into the graveyard within the original game, oh, and there is at least one card (Regrowth) around at the time that allows them to be pulled out of the graveyard... Yah, banning this one was probably inevitable.
If you have cards that bring cards back from the graveyard, it can be much worse.
@@RGC_animation I was noting that this is the maximum simultaneous number, cards on the stack don't carry over to the sub-games so 8 activations (with 8 more ready to immediately resolve in suspended games) is the maximum depth of a single chain of activations (with cards of the time, more might be possible now), but even more activations later in each game is still very possible. Even in Arabian Knights at least 24 activations in the main game are possible with Fork and Regrowth (with the number falling off with each sub-game in a stack and with each non-Fork generated activation), just not all as an onion of simultaneous sub-sub-games.
Nexus of Fate got banned specifically on arena because people made games go on infinitely against streamers, and Wizards can't program a timer to prevent it. :(
Lol
Cauldron familiar with witches oven was such a fun broken deck before it got banned in standard. Also scute swarm breaks arena wayyy worse when you have it trigger 150+ times.
As a Yu-Gi-Oh player, these ban reasons are so wild. I can't imagine Konami banning a card because it was annoying in sims or incites gambling lol
Conquistador of the Golden Land limited to 1 in Master Duel comes to mind as a very strange not quite ban to Hit Eldlich.
For gambling cards to be banned they need to exist in the first place. If they had printed some, they would've had to ban them later too.
Be careful about that language there, “gamble card” actually has a meaning in YuGiOh, which is any card with an effect that has an outcome determined by a coin flip or die roll (d6)
Instead Konami bans cards to sell new sets.
Wait until you hear about Frankie Peanuts, which already helped players sent their own opponents to the Shadow Realm (read - kill themselves or be disqualified due to breaking the game rules) much better than YGO ever did.
Rukh Egg was banned because at the time, there were no play or draw rules. So you could simply draw your 8, discard to 7, throw the Rukh away, and boom. You've got a big nasty flyer to start turn 2 with. The Bazaar was barely worth anything because people were looking for the Library of Alexandria, and discard strategies didn't start to get explored until 1995/1996.
I'm also going to mention a weird ban for a weird reason: Bridge from Below was banned because Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis was to powerful. A card that had seen very little serious play in modern, only played in a low tier niche deck got banned because one of the most powerful creatures to be legal in the modern format was printed. Yes, I'm still salty about that. And no, I will not yield until this atrocious mistake is fixed by WotC.
The secret text of Shahrazad is WW all opponents lose half their life rounded down. It's never a time sink unless an opponent decides for it to be, they can just concede the subgame.
Another good addition to the list would be the number of cards that have been temporarily banned because of glitches on MTGO like the one that causes peoples games to crash (I forget the actual card)
I just noticed. Technically the entire subgame happens during the turn you activate Shahrazad... Gods.
EDIT: for those unaware, there is a mechanic in Magic called Storm, wich copies the spell that has it on cast, as many times as spells you have used that turn, and every spell used during the subgames count as being casted on the turn Shahrazad is activated. It's trivial to get literally infinite subgames from that interaction.
Also shoutouts to Floral Spuzzum, wich in it's original incarnation, required THE CARD ITSELF to somehow decide wether or not it wanted to activate it's effects. Since unfortunately sentient cards aren't a thing yet in real life, it was eventually fixed to require the PLAYER that activated it to decide instead.
yeah it's part of a spell resolving so that is when it's happening
@@n__neen Point is, imagine resolving a Storm card AFTER the subgame ends
@@joanaguayoplanell4912 This particular issue wouldn't be a problem. Rule 725.1b states that no effects in the subgame (including number of spells played) may have an effect on the main game unless the effect that created the subgame says so.
That guy ripping and sprinkling his chaos orb is absolutely legendary...
Adding to the companions banned for weird reasons. Lutri, the Spellchaser was banned in Commander the day it was spoiled because it's companion restriction is just the normal rules of Commander.
Consistently high quality videos on frequent output. Impressive
Magic: Commander, the 100 card format, is our most popular format, and people love it!
Also Magic: 80 cards is too many for the tiny baby hands of anyone playing magic. There's no way anyone could reasonable shuffle more than 60 cards, so we banned yorion.
Divine Intervention: Don't forget that in those days, playing for Ante was a thing. If you weren't going to win the game, and didn't want to lose your ante card, a draw is the only viable option.
Another thing with Shahrazad is that it has some very wild and confusing interactions when you start adding in cards that interact with 'cards outside the game' like Burning Wish, basically twisting the game logic into knots and creating a theoretical nightmare for judges
I imagine another reason that Chaos Orb/Falling Star is banned is that a popular way to play Legacy/Vintage is through the MTG Online client and how do you replicate that card effect in digital?
Just tear up the card virtually, duh. It's not like physics systems are a new thing.
Official rules, Btw: Yes, the Scheherazade in your original game IS outside your subgame. Which, yeah, mechanical nightmare.
@@calemr Why is "Asmoranimardicadaistinaculdacar" easier to type than "Shahrazad" anyway?
Legacy and Vintage in paper and digital are not completely in sync anyway, though. There are many old cards that aren't there because they are obnoxious to program and not relevant to the metagame.
@@QuantemDeconstructor Because one is an original name, the other is a misspelling of an already existent name that's historically relevant enough that it's even in my phone's autocorrect.
I honestly love it when upstart card games take random broken effects and print them on cards regardless of how stupid it might be. Something like Chaos Orb or Shahrazad in Magic and stuff like Fiber Jar and Victory Dragon in Yugioh are pretty good reasons to play card games.
I'm curious, what were you supposed to do with the cards that were already on the field when Shaharazad was played? Were you supposed to leave them there, or stack them up and put them aside? Depending on the answer, table space might have been a bigger concern than time for tournament organizers/card shop staff.
They stay in the main game so yes table space becomes a problem pretty quickly.
And even worse - cards like Living Wish and Burning Wish can pull cards from the main game into the sub game, creating a huge headache for remembering what was where (you have to put everything back once the sub game is over).
And yes this includes using Burning Wish during the sub-game to grab the copy of Shahrazad that is currently on the stack in the main game waiting to resolve.
I used to run a Shaharizad deck, i built on a dare, in my casual group. One game I put 8 copies of Shaharizad on the stack. We played played it out. The game took 7 hours.
In the very early days of magic there wasn't a rule stating a maximum number of copies of cards you could play in a deck, and one strategy was to play a deck entirely full of balances and mox pearls, leading to some pretty silly games. As a result you, could argue, every card was restricted to a maximum of 4 copies excluding basic lands. Pretty weird to think about these days.
There was also a deck from that time that was only copies of Channel and Fireball along with mox+lotus+ancestral recall. It was rare that the deck didn't kill on turn 1, in a time when Force of Will didn't exist yet.
@@jasonslade6259 and that's where the name for the popular website Channel Fireball comes from! I will cast lightning bolt in response though...
@@jasonslade6259 there was also a mono blue deck based around drawing a ton of cards with braingeyser, hurkyl's recalling for a bunch more mana, and then milling out the opponents entire deck with another braingeyser
All that about Orcish Oriflamme, but no mention of Goblin Oriflamme, which is a straight-up power creep version that really does cost 1R.
Also, I used to joke with my friends about building a deck with 4 Shahrazads, 4 Karn Liberated, and 1 Divine Intervention to make the most soul-crushing play sequence ever of subgame, subgame, restart the game, subgame, draw.
That contract from below image looks like the Summer Magic version of the card. That is an interesting choice to include in the video.
The companion mechanic is literally going to haunt WotC for the rest of eternity. I wonder if it will eventually become the second mechanic to receive an 11 on the storm scale? (It's at a 9 right now)
The nerf has solved basically every problem with it. The deck restrictions weren't harsh enough in some cases, but add 3 mana to it and you're good.
Hirumared?! Awesome! Now I get my favorite lore and weird trivia master for my other addiction too
Ante was a neat idea, because it acted as kind of like chess ratings: if your cards were much better than your opponent's cards, then you would likely be anteing a more valuable card as well.
But in practice, it's impractical and not fun.
WotC: "Shuffling 80 cards is too hard, so we're gonna ban Yorion"
Commander players:🤨
Modern Yorion decks run upwards of 20 fetchlands. They often shuffle every turn.
Add to that the fact that in tournaments, you are required to present your deck so your opponent can also shuffle or cut it every time you shuffle your deck, and it definitely slows things down. (Also tournaments have to complete 3 games in 50 minutes)
Oh, and Yorion was also causing other issues already:
- Yorion decks often homogenized into value piles.
- When Yorion was actually played, it led to unfun gamestates (sometimes involving flickerwisp to keep looping it).
Dude I have giant spider hands and struggle with my decks. Kids would be terrible.
Oh God, it never even occurred to me what would happen with four copies of Shahrazad in a deck, let alone copying shenanigans...
Sensei's Divining Top was banned in part because it made turns longer, by giving the player more choices overall, and leading to longer decision-making throughout the entire game (especially since it's almost impossible to destroy)
Surprised at the lack of time vault and Flash: Only cards that has been banned, unbanned after erratas, and then even stronger after erratas and being banned.
In 1998, while judging a Type-1 (Vintage) tournament, one of the players managed to cast Shahrazad three times during the same game. We had to wait the extra eighty for this table to finish before we could continue with the tournament. Pretty annoying. Fortunately, the storyteller deck (we called it) didn't continute onto the quarterfinals. Nevertheless, the card was also in my "Bad Karma" deck for the longest time also strictly for pissing people off... I can totally see why it needed to be banned.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Yorion's utility as pitch fodder for a free Solitude or Force of Negation. Ironically, the change to the companion rule that nerfed Lurrus in Vintage may have made Yorion stronger in Modern.
I love how the cards with bad art or names weren’t mentioned when they were literally banned for reasons outside of the game.
There's a funny one which the effect is "Destroy all black creatures", you can probably guess why it was banned.
If it wasnt banned due to ante, Contract from Below would have a compelling case for most powerful card ever printed. Forget Ancestral Recall- this one allows you to draw a new hand for just 1 mana. Having to ante a card would be meaningless since you were not likely to lose after resolving it.
Not to mention, if Contract from below were legal you could play 4 of them and essentially play a 56 card deck.
Unofficial number 11: Crusade
It’s a an enchantment for two white mana whose effect is: “All white creatures get +1/+1”
You can probably tell why this card was banned.
Not only is this card banned in Legacy, Vintage and Commander; Scryfall intentionally hides the card art on their database and doesn’t provide links to TCGplayer or Cardmarket.
There is a handful of other cards that were banned for basically the same reason.
Crusade should have never been banned.
I get Invoke Prejudice. But Crusade? No.
Jihad is also a card banned in that off-putting batch of magic banned cards...
And if wotc wanted to score woke points by banning those, magic's interpretation of jihad is actually one of the rare interpretations of the word by westerners that doesn't involve suicide bombing, so it should've been fine...
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the rules, but Contract from Below has the issue that it would be a 4x staple in any Legacy or Vintage deck if it was playable as it is.
Because if I understand it correctly it is a part of your deck, so it counts toward your minimum deck size, but removes itself as an effect when the game starts, meaning you are playing with a more consistent deck. Even limited at 1, it turns them in 59 cards deck.
It's not as insane as the actual effect, but wizards still wouldn't want it.
I'm glad you mentioned the chaos orb story it was a very smart play if it was true
I like the Ante System. Reminds me of the Old School Magic Book "Arena", which is my favorite of Magic Books (with Planeshift, Nemesis, and Chainer's Torment being close behind). When "Fighters" lost a spell match, they'd lose one Spell to the opponent, or in a Death Match the opponent would take their whole Satchel of Spell Amulets minus a Mana Tribute to "The Walker" that ruled that Plane. It was a Great Book and I'd love to see a Garth One-Eye Legendary card.
Garth came out as a creature in Modern Horizons 2
At first I read the title as “top 10 CATS that were banned” but this is good too
I found one card that was banned that fits this list perfectly, I can't remember what it's called but the effect is "Destroy all black creatures", you can probably guess why it was banned.
It's called Cleanse. It was banned at the same time as a bunch of other cards.
Video on the few Vintage Bans sounds cool. Not even ygo ever ban something in traditional format o think.
The only bans are:
-Ante cards
-Dexterity cards
-Shahrazad (the only subgame card)
-Conspiracy cards: These were created for a specific Limited format and don't really work in Constructed because they have zero opportunity cost.
-Cards that were banned recently for having offensive names or art
Lurrus is the only card to ever have been banned for power reasons, that's why it was a big deal. After the companion nerf, it's now legal again.
I was waiting for KCI to be on this list. Banned for being unpopular to watch on stream
Our FLGS had one employee who had a deck in the early years in case anyone every offered to play for ante, allowed to be dusted off only for someone who the owner never wanted to walk into the store again.
It contained 4 Scheherazade (groan) and every ante card, and was around a 120 card deck. The concept was simply to cause your opponent to ante more cards than they had in their deck, with 4 ways of creating games within games.
It didn't actually set him back that much at the time since no one actually liked ante and would never play it. As far as I know it was only used in test games as a joke though, it was never actually used to steal someone's deck, just a demonstration of why ante was a terrible idea.
I think a good inclusion would be Memory Jar. As far as I know it is still the only card that was banned in an emergency. It was already Combo Winter during Urza's block and things would have only gotten worse with this card
I Yugioh there's a few cards which if you win the game using, the the effect is that you win the entre set.
They got banned not because they were too powerful, but because the card was considered to promote poor tournament etiquette.
In Yugioh you're allowed to concede the game at any point. So if you saw that you were about to lose to this card, you could concede before its effect goes off to prevent it.
He made a video about it already
I used to play a golgari cat oven deck on arena while it was still in standard. Never even realized it got banned, probably because I didn't play much after a while. But I also remember briefly coming back to the game after it rotated out, and it was still legal in historic, which I don't remember if the format even existed before my first hiatus. I haven't touched it again since, long time even before alchemy, which I will never play because screw having to relearn effects of existing cards when they get rebalanced.
You should make a video to explain the most convoluted magic play ever- and use every card ever created. :O
That Cauldron FAmiliar thing is worse online too cos not only are you forcefully passing priority back and forth, your opponent is likely doing some kind of infinite combo with it. So you're not doing this once per turn. Unless you concede, you're probably gonna spend the next 5 minutes just passing priority. You'd stop playing Arena right then and therre.
Love how a mechanic potentially violating the law isnt as much a reason to ban it as everyone hating it
An honor roll mention probably could be the Sensei's Divining Top ban in legacy...it was banned for making the games take too long in legacy because of top's interaction with counterbalance
Shahrazad is also notable for being one of the cards illustrated by Kaja Foglio, currently known for her and her husband Phil's webcomic _Girl Genius._
Shahrazad is a really dope card if you've read "1001 Arabian Nights"
I still have my deck with 4 Shahrazad (with Panoptic Mirrors and other copy effects) and a Divine Intervention. Also ran a bunch of effects to remove cards from the game, as at the time I made it, cards removed in the sub game stayed removed.
Chaos orb: I think the followup joke was the guy lost the match cause immediately after he ripped up his card he was deck checked and was playing with an illegal deck short one card of the minimum.
Princess Twilight Sparkle also has an effect to draw the game, or rather, have "everypony" win. It's silver bordered though.
I loved Ante. Won my friend's Emerald Mox three times off him (would always trade it back). Oh if we'd only known.
It's weird that Cauldron Familiar was banned in standard because of Arena because it is currently in alchemy, which is the Arena-exclusive version of standard.
Rukh Egg without errata today would not hit the board from mill or discard, because the rules text is only active on the battlefield unless otherwise stated or implied (a stated example would be panglacial wurm, which reads "this card from your library." an implied example would be madness, which is a discard trigger. since cards are discarded from the hand, it would be meaningless if it were not active there.). for the unintended effect of Rukh to be actual under modern comprehensive rules, it would have to intended with the explicit text "enters the graveyard from anywhere." as a side note to old formatting and all this, there were instances where they misworded discard instead of sacrifice, so in another reality madness would have been confusing.
This is just hypothetical though. "When ~ is put into a graveyard" period doesn't exist in any card, there's no precedent to say that it would or wouldn't work. Abilities implicitly work "how they should" when moving or checking a zone, just like how Bloodghast's ability only works in the graveyard *because* it mentions it returning from the graveyard.
to talk about aetherworks marvel
they didn't ban that card first, they banned Emrakul promised end because before banning aetherworks the deck had eight copies of huge elderazi issues which made it much more than 10% of just winning on turn four. So to not shut down the deck entirely they just decided to remove one of the bigger threats. That threat being the almost untouchable (in both spells and blocks) flying spaghetti monster. Not only that you got to take their turn and just remove whatever creature they may of have into a bad attack as well.
though while they never unbanned Emrakul after the Marvel ban, I'm sure most players were fine with it due to the fact that it's unfun to see your opponent play YOUR deck and force unfavorable actions upon you. (plus the fact it pushed midrange decks out with it's Pro Instants)
Surprised Invoke Prejudice wasn't on this list. I don't think there will be any more cards banned for that reason ever again!
I don't think THAT would qualify as a 'weird' reason. How that card made it far enough to actually be printed I have no idea.
It got _three_ spiritual successors in Neon Dynasty. A freak's idea of Justice (white) can devolve into or involve prejudice, and Despair and Calamity (red and black) are likely byproducts of - again - prejudice.
IDFK how that cycle made it into Neon Dynasty. Ironically enough, though, The Winds (blue) is one of the two safe cards in the cycle.
@@RaceBandit Those at least are.. vague enough not to cause any problems.
Invoke Prejudice on the other hand literally looks and reads like a group of klansmen at a cross burning.
@@RaceBandit Not seeing how that cycle has anything to do with Invoke Prejudice, beyond having 4 of the same color in the cost and having the word "invoke' in the title. Are you suggesting that word is racist?
If you do 4 copies of Shahrazad and 4 copies of Nefarious Lich as they all stack on each other, you end up with the equivalent of "I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream"
Kinda surprised Oko, Thief of Crowns didn't get a mention.
shoutout to all the cards banned like last year for being offensive, which unironically gave the cards more attention than they'd seen in years (because they're unplayably bad)
15:00 ... I've been since Alpha and I once played a subgame of Shahrazad in a subgame of Shahrazad. The card was banned in our local play group that day.
Speaking of banned cards, you should do a video on Oracle of the Alpha. It was just recently put out as a digital only card.
For 3 mana you get a 2/3 Bird Wizard with Flying. Every time it attacks you scry 1. When it enters the battlefield you conjure the Power Nine into your deck.
Time Walk, Black Lotus, Timetwister, Ancestral Recall, and all of the Mox gems are now legal in Historic because of it.
It's not actually that powerful because the power of the power 9 comes from the fact that you could have multiples of them in your starting hand enabling you explosive turn ones that determine the game. Oracle of the alpha is a three drop creature, which is why it's not as powerful
Regarding the Lurrus, I don't understand how it could cast the Black lotus from the Graveyard seeing as the Black lotus is an artifact, not a spell.
a yet further reason that Shahrazad was banned: when a game goes to time, technically speaking you're supposed to play five more turns - finish the current turn, then the next four (two for each player). So. If you cast Shahrazad, and then while resolving the subgame, the game goes to time, it's four more turns in the subgame before everything ends in a draw, right?
Wrong.
Because you're TECHNICALLY still in the middle of resolving Shahrazad, you have to *completely finish the subgame* to even finish the FIRST turn of "going to time". Add on the fact that back when Shahrazad was new, the "four-of rule" hadn't been added yet, and so there was a very real worry of people showing up to tournaments with decks consisting of nothing but Plains and Shahrazad, nesting subgames upon subgames upon subgames that would take hours to complete A TURN, let alone a full game? Yeah, Shahrazad got banned and banned hard.
Yorion being ban definitely was also power level related for modern.
Cauldron familiar is just straight up broken. It's shown in every winrate metric. The card singlehandedly removes combat from your opponent and with devil it's an autowin mode. The combo was the best deck in historic for a long time (now nerfed) and is still a major player in pioneer. In standard there wasn't much you can do against it. Plus it's also way too good with trail of crumbs.
Divine Intervention would be a cool card if it read, "If there are no Intervention counters, if you would ever lose the game, it's a draw instead". That would actually be a Divine Intervention..
I’m guessing the “too many triggers” thing was also why they created the Toxic mechanic for All Will Be One. I’m pretty sure it’s literally just Poisonous, but not a triggered ability
I wonder how unbanning ante cards could alter eternal formats. After all, while they wouldn't use their ante-related effects, they would remove themselves from the deck meaning that they basicaly thin your deck by themselves. If you played a 60 card deck with 53 ante cards. You would have a guaranteed 7 card starting hand... which would be degenerate. Maybe that could be fixed by only allowing a few ante cards to be legal for 56, 52 or 48 card decks, making them a more litteral "reduce your deck size by X" than Upstart f cking Goblin from yu-gi-oh. That would be wild
I informally did that back in the mid 90's. We had "non serious" decks (really, none of our decks were good) that we didn't mind losing cards from, so they were stacked with all the bulky stuff that dealt with ante. Contract was the best of course.
But the funny thing is that it did change things if you removed all them - the deck went to 52 cards or so, so about 10% more consistency on drawing what you needed.
When a card said that you should remove it from your deck if you're not playing for ante, it was BEFORE presenting your deck, like a deck building restriction. It doesn't mean "exile this at the beginning of the game".
@@fernandobanda5734 oh... thanks for the info
There are only nine cards with the Ante mechanic. Which makes a total of 36 total for a deck.
But how could you unban them whilst not using the mechanic?
It’s a nonsensical proposition.
Nexus of fate should definitely be on the list, it was banned only on magic arena and only in bo1(standard was the only constructed format on arena at the time) the reason for it's banning was that back then you wouldn't time out like today so if the game reached a point where only Nexus is in your library it was possible to cast it infinitely (or until the opponent concede).
The ban on marvel was sound mine won like 70 to 90% of the time even against bad matchups, and yorion was banned to curb control decks (people hate control especially good control shells when I counter a spell turn 1-2 I usually get a scoop on arena) which is also why they didn't give us an esper triome.
Lutri, another companion card, was banned in EDH as soon as it was announced because it was too easy to include in any commander deck using UR
Second Sunrise, Faith's Reward and Sensei's Divining Top - all banned for time reasons, the first two specifically because of the "eggs" deck, the last just for slowing down the game in gereral
Wait wait wait. So you're saying there was cards with an effect of throwing the card up high and one that make subgames???
Man, Magic was chaotic back then.
The more important question about divine intervention isn't about it being banned. Its about why wotc decided it was a good idea to print a card with the phrase "the game is a draw" on it.
I collect the Arabian Knights set, had no idea that card was banned (makes sense though)
Shahrazad, the Fiber Jar of MtG. And somehow even worse.
At least Fiber Jar isn't THAT restarting or prolonging.