A couple people are getting confused here so I want to put this out there. These are all mechanics that Mark Rosewater has given a storm scale rating of 10 meaning, in his words, "I never say never, but this would require a major miracle." There is likely a handful of keywords that aren't included that could be but he hasn't given them a storm scale rating. There is no use in arguing that a mechanic "isn't that bad" when I am citing THE head designer for Magic: the Gathering.
@@tochoXK3 A 10 means no cards in standard unless there is a major miracle. I think the major miracle is that Magic is now allowing guest appearances from some keywords. This way they can do some flashy things but they hopefully don't get too out of hand
Fear is such a flavorful mechanic. Intimidate is not. Why would a green creature frighten a black/white/blue/red creature but not another green one? The flavor of Fear is that black and artifact creatures lack this emotion and it just fits so well.
@@Sepp_Tember I think it makes sense most for green, with the idea that a big beast creature would want to challenge another big beast. But other colors would not want any of that smoke
@@MireValethis logic can apply for any big creature of any color. isnt there a mechanic where a creature cant be blocked except by those over a certain power?
They can't give characters on horseback horsemanship for one set, because it would make no sense why thousands of creatures from other sets, that are also mounted, wouldn't have the ability. They probably regret creating this mechanic in the first place for Three Kingdoms.
Most deprecated mechanics were replaced with understandable reasons. Mechanically, i'll like to see Shroud from time to time. It's Hexprooof with a pretty smart built in drawback and i prefer it over Ward. Flavorwise, Regenerate and Fear/Intimidate are really evokative and it's a shame they didn't work out.
I agree with the shroud comment. They made ward to be the fair way to do hexproof, when shroud did a great job at it. I do think there are a lot of magic players that miss that shroud stops everyone, just in the same way that a lot of players miss that protection also protects a creature against your own auras. And yeah, its a shame when we lose words for keywords that could be something cooler. Personally, I think the word Rampage could evoke something gruul where its like trample but then it does something extra/different.
@@HarrisontheManaDorkI think Mark Rosewater has said that (newer) players had trouble with shroud. They kept enchanting their own shroud creatures for instance. In that sense hexproof is the 'fixed' shroud. But both mechanics lead to less interactive and that's why we got ward... oh well.
@marcodaddario3965 they have sort of brought back regenerate only now they spell it out like "Cost - tap this creature, it gains indestructible until end of turn."
@@marcodaddario3965 Shroud was just too confusing for many players and admittedly, the biggest continual confusion comes in the way that auras can attach to creatures with Shroud, but not when they're cast. It also feels bad to not be able to target your own things and Hexproof was the way to be less confusing, but also clearly too broken
I recall a card that my friends and I treated as a "Gotcha" card, even though it wasn't, and that was Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table). Every time someone said "Goblin SWAT Team" (slaps the table), whether they controlled Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table) or not, we all had to slap the table within 5 seconds. Otherwise, each player who controlled a Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table) would be allowed to put a +1 counter on each their Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table). It was absolutely the wrong way to play Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table), but we all loved playing Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table) like that anyway.
A major issue with fear, intimidate, and landwalks is that either you were open and couldn't block at all, or you were safe and the cards were blank, at the deckbuilding phase. It's not fun to have a creature in your deck be useless, and it's not fun to see your opponent have an unsolvable problem because you accidentally played the wrong one of the five colors.
Reminds me of one of the siller and really not good decks I made during ice age barbarian guides and weather vain (had a word before that began with A. but been too long can't remember) make an opponents land snow covered with weather vain. the barbarian guides give something snow-covered land walk. It did work but was slow and not good.
@@OFSheep on the other hand, having direct damage creatures makes it easier to trigger "if dealt damage to a player" type effects, and makes opponents have to have direct counters instead of JUST having bigger badder monsters than you. It creates more modes of play and more strategies that can be used. And the pass through type creatures were almost always balanced to at least be low on attack.
The funniest thing about ante is it wasn't even banned strictly for the gambling aspect. There are nine cards with ante and if they weren't banned you could play four copies of each of them. If you're not playing a game with ante then you remove them from your deck before the game starts but after your deck is checked if it's legal. Your 60 card deck is now 24 cards, combo city.
Yes, exactly this. You build a small, specific wombo-combo like Channel/Fireball or whatever, and half your deck doesn't make it into your Library on Turn 1. Doubling your odds to draw the win condition is a strong strategy.
@@odarkeq It's way more than doubling your odds. Not only is 24 less than half of 60, it's not a linear relationship either. Rough rule of thumb is that you have about a 15% chance of drawing both parts of a two-card combo in your opener in a 60 card deck with 4 of each card, not counting mulligans (as mulligan rules have changed over the years and heavily complicate the math). That goes to about 50% in a 24-card deck if my back-of-the-envelope estimate is right. If you extend that to 10 cards instead of 7 it gets even sillier.
Also note that the original rules were 40 card decks. It wasn't 60 cards until the first major rules revision. I was a judge during alpha/beta, the original rules also didn't have 4 card limits. Within the first few months we were already experimenting with restricting number of copies, expanding the deck size limits and discussing if cards needed to be banned. Ante cards were the first thing to be banned to prevent the exploit you mentioned, even before the power 9 were restricted to one of each.
Banding is a fun mechanic, not a good one but there's some interesting things you can do with it... Anything that triggers when it's blocked or takes damage works well with it Tolarian enchanter is a favorite of mine. There's stuff that kills things when blocking, stuff that draws you cards... As for remade versions of it I believe Mutate an equally confusing keyword could qualify as a version of banding, several creatures combining their abilities to attack as one.
It definitely a neat mechanic but both it and mutate have too many moving parts. You start to understand it and throw a wrench into the mix and you need an old judge and a new judge.
It would be interesting to make a cube that lets banding shine. Focus entirely on creatures, combat tricks, and other things that put tactical play in the combat phase front and center.
@@HarrisontheManaDork The bigger issue isn't actually Banding, but the way Bands With Other used to work. See, it didn't work the way every sensible person thinks it works, which is that a card that says "Bands with other Dinosaurs" can band with other dinosaurs. Nononono, that would make too much sense. Instead, it meant that it could band with other cards that had "Bands with other Dinosaurs" - and of course, it could join a band of Banding creatures. WotC has finally, for some reason, fixed it - literally as of Magic 2010 - so that Old Fogey can now, in fact, freely Band with other Dinosaurs and not just other Old Fogeys. I'm not clear why they felt it necessary to fix it at that point in time, since it had long since been left by the wayside. If you think I'm joking go grab a copy of the comp rules from 10th edition or older and look it up.
Banding is bad enough, but "Bands with other..." is a whole 'nother level of confusing since it, contrary to the naming, isn't just a limited form of Banding. There are subtle differences that change how it operates.
Funny enough though I personally misunderstood and screwed up mechanics all the time banding was one of the few me and my friends got right from the get go never had problems with it then I moved and found out that no one at all where I moved could figure it out. Not sure how people get confused by it the examples in the rules for banding alweas made perfect sense to me. A little wordy but perfectly understandable. Not that there were not other things in the rule book that we had trouble with there deffenitly was. Just not with banding.
i wish i could get this game to run so bad i cant even get it working on an old windoes xp laptop, DAMN YOU DAVE AND YOUR EXTRA COOL TIMER THAT DOESNT WORK
The reason why Ante was banned from magic is because back in the 90’s when WotC was expanding their market by going to places like Brazil where gambling is illegal. That is why they had to give up on it.
Another mechanic that could be a good example of deprecated mechanics is infect from Scars block. And how poison counters kinda went full circle from a fixed amount per damage (like pit Scorpion or Virulent Sliver), to infect and then nerfed back to fixed numbers in the toxic mechanic. Also, another reason why landwalk fear and intimidate were retired isn't just the unblockablity, it's that it is a very matchup dependent mechanic. Esther your opponent plays the right color to Block and the ability is almost useless, or they don't and it's way too strong
Infect is a funny beast on its own too because infect came out in 2010, but poison counters have been around since the 90s. They've been constantly trying to figure out how to make poison work in a way that isn't too strong that it is broken, but isn't so weak that no one plays it.
In today's scene, infect is balanced. Getting poison counters on someone tends to make you a target, since they're almost impossible to remove and usually you're the only one with it. If the Atraxa player plays a Prologue to Phyresis, suddenly everyone's attention is on the Atraxa player and getting them gone. While yes there are combos that can be used to instantly poison someone to death (Ziatora the Incinerator getting infect can be a big problem if you get something big to fling), that's more of a game-winning combo, something that can usually require several turns to set up (in my case, I run Prossh, so my opponents have allowed me to get three heavy duty value pieces out and keep them out for at least a turn cycle)
I hope Level up returns in a future set. Aside from Hexdrinker from Modern Horizons 1, it's only even been printed in Rise of the Eldrazi. Just the keyword itself sounds very RPG-like. The main problem is that you have to be willing to sink mana into it to level it up. Which can be bad if your opponent has a removal spell with your creature's name on it.
Yeah I found out about level up through hexdrinker(I was going to build a snake tribal deck) I also wish there was a level up themed commander I can use, I have prismatic bridge as my commander for now, tho I might see if I can do without red and go atraxa
There are a couple keywords we'll never see printed again because they literally deleted them from the comprehensive rules. The first such keyword is "Threshold", which might be confusing as Threshold is coming back in Bluoomburrow. But that is Threshold as an "ability word" instead of a keyword. Ability words are just a flavor name a cards abilities, often unifying them across multiple cards. Introduced in Saviors of Kamigawa with abilities like "Channel". When it was printed in Odyssey block, Threshold was a keyword that said "You have threshold as long as you have seven or more cards in your graveyard." It was changed to an ability word because, honestly it was just less confusing to write the rules text out every time. So this keyword being deleted is more of a technicality than anything else. Threshold is still alive and well in spirit. The second deleted keyword of is "Landhome". Like Landwalk, Landhome called out a landtype, almost exclusively islands, and read "This creature can't attack unless the defending player controls a (land). Sacrifice this creature if you don't control a (land)." Really old heads will recognize this as the Sea Serpent ability, commonly found on early cards depicting sea monsters that logically couldn't survive on land. This was the first time Magic created a keyword to replace commonly used rules text. Landhome. Not Haste. Not Fear or Vigilance or Reach or Flash. Landhome. That was the keyword that Magic really needed. Landhome was only printed in Mirage block, and only on a couple of cards. The problems with Landhome were multiple. 1) It was pretty much exclusive to Islands. Sure, there was a rare Foresthome or Mountainhome creature, but those were mostly novelty. 2) The ability is 100% all drawback. Like Echo, Fading/Vanishing or Cumulative Upkeep, players prefer abilities that have an upside and deeply dislike abilities that feel like a punishment. 3) The Landhome ability was already on it's way out. Sacrificing your creature because your opponent Stone Rained your last Island was a major "Feels Bad" moment, so by Tempest block, WotC dropped the sacrifice clause and with it, the usefulness of the Landhome keyword. So they deleted the keyword and reverted all the cards with Landhome back to spelling out the rules text. Designers kept using the attack restriction for sea monsters for another decade or so. Until they dropped it all together a decade later, when they realized that players prefer smashing face with their giant creatures more than they cared about the illogical flavor.
They still occasionally print an Islandhome (or Islandhome-styled) card without the Islandhome keyword, but it's very rare, and a lot of them are in "remastered" sets. If you want to exclude those, Sealock Monster is in Theros which is fairly recent, and has an inbuilt way around the restriction.
Bring back cumulative upkeep on some cards that do stuff when they hit the graveyard. A black creature that's strong for its cost but sucks up more and more of your mana until you let it die would be cool if it got to kill something when it dies. You've got an interesting choice there.
That could have been a way to balance Braid of Fire again in a post-mana burn world. Something like "when it leaves the battlefield, you take damage equal to its cumulative upkeep," so you have to consider how big you want this pile of red mana every turn to get before it potentially explodes on you.
I built a deck based on Cumulative upkeep, I had found a card online, but it was a fake card. It was super convincing. It read: Universal Acceleration, "Cumulative upkeep --- Take an additional upkeep step after this one. Universal Acceleration's cumulative upkeep does not trigger during extra upkeep steps." this meant every turn that passes, you would have an additional upkeep trigger over the previous turn. So I started building around upkeep triggers. I hadn't heard of cumulative upkeep prior to this, so I had no frame of reference to realize how broken this was from the onset. It wasn't until I tried to find the card for sale that I realized my error. however, I started searching for combos to simulate this effect. so Paradox haze became the cornerstone, and spells that allowed me to copy enchantments. Xur the enchanter became the commander as many of those spells, including haze itself were 3 mana or less. The deck has a lot of room for improvement, but it's a ton of fun.
Banding was good in Limited but not in Constructed. In Constructed, you often want to leak damage through to chip away at your opponent’s life total. The only reason why the rules were confusing was because it worked differently on offense or defense and there was no internet back then. But back in the day I often could explain Banding to newbies in one sentence.
@@xerty5502 Hey if you're drafting in a pod and you draft "a bazillion things in response" cards, more power to you. Obviously you can't get more than a few combat trick instants in a sealed deck.
@@xerty5502 Which is important in Constructed but for Banding, it doesn't come up much in Limited. But if you're saying that's why no one plays it in Constructed, yes.
Banding is extremely broken. Because of how Damage Dealt is managed in Magic, having Banding meant that you could make all of the damage of a card go to one of the blockers. So if you attacked with a 10/10 and a 1/1, and your oponente blocked with an 11/11, you didn't made an even trade. You said "I assign all of your 11 combat damage points to the 1/1", and you kept the 10/10. BTW, this also meant that if you blocked using Banding, you effectively negated TRAMPLE, because once again, you negated the attackers ability to assign combat damage. You could also divide the damage in parts, instead of choosing order of creatures like having multiple blockers. (Ex. If you attack with a 3/3 and your oponent blocks with a 1/3A, a 1/1B and a 1/2C, if you attacked A first, you only killed that. If youattacked B and then A, you only killed B, if you attacked C, then B, then A, you killed everything EXCEPT A. Well. In the contrary way, with Banding, if you are the blocker in this, you can choose to assign 2 damage to A and 1 damage to C, instead of choosing "order of blocking", which is not the same. This way, all of your creatures are alive). While Banding is shamelessly complicated in text with no real reason, learning how it actually makes the game work is a good way to understand game mechanics like Combat and Damage Steps and Assignation of Damage.
Getting rid of Banding is such a crime... shield knights and walls could benefit so much from the mechanic. Being able to band as a group and block a serious threat, kill it without losing everything? That's so cool. But seeing as it's been 30 years, how did it work with rampage?
Most of this list, ti me, is a reminder of how much more fun the game was way back when... im glad people enjoy the game now but nostalgia is a bitxh and I love things like landwalk, banding, regenerate, etc... hell, I feel like the older cards were better for our vocabulary.
Banding is really good for blocking if your opponent runs a lot of big tramplers because you can choose to assign all of the damage to whichever one of your creatures you need the least. You can block a a 90/90 trampler with three 2/2 creatures and have all ninety damage hit only one of them, perhaps one you've made indestructible, and if one member of your band has deathtouch, then the giant monster is probably dead.
I remember the original mechanics for the "Kor" creatures from the Tempest (Rath) block, which were humanoids that could redirect damage to or from another creature you controlled. That mechanic was quickly dropped because it ended up being way too powerful and tedious to use.
Banding certainly has use cases, but they are all so niche that banding is never a reason to play a card, and there are no banding cards printed worth playing in pretty much every format. Some extremely niche use like protecting an all-in commander from infinite sized blockers may exist, but there are probably always better, more flexible cards to run instead.
@@ElPayasoMalo Thing is, there are a ton of ways to shut down green trample-heavy EDH decks, ways that are more flexible and better agianst other strategies too.
@@pidgeotroll Sure, but the fun of EDH is seeing unexpected tactics and weird cards you wouldn't see in other formats. Nobody expects the Banding Inquisition!
Having played in the release of Unhinged...Gotcha was so much fun. At some point in the night, whenever someone yelled "Gotcha" in a game, the whole room would respond "Ayy!" This lead to a few extra Gotchas from laughter. If you take a silverbordered game so seriously that you are worried about Gotcha, you kinda missed the point
I'm happy to hear that it actually served its purpose of some light hearted fun for some groups. It seems like a cool thing for silver border but I could definitely see Maro's reasoning behind cutting it
Banding is actually really strong. The reason why it shouldn’t return is because of the complicated rules that define how to actually form a band that even spawned the „bands with“ variant.
I don't get why people think banding is difficult. You read the oracle text, right? It isn't more difficult than that. The band blocks or is blocked as one creature, and the controller of the band gets to decide how damage is dealt among the band.
Honestly one of the most fascinating old keywords I have seen is "Epic" which was printed on a single spell for each color. It had the effect of copying itself every turn at the cost of you no longer being able to cast any other spell.
Banding is easily explained as “my group of creatures is treated as if it’s one creature in combat and I get to choose how to assign combat damage dealt to that group instead of how you would normally be able to” If they rephrase some of the reminder text I think it could be possible to bring it back but it’s definitely not strong enough to really want it back anyway…
Not quite. Your creatures don't share abilities and a single removal spell won't kill all of them. You also need to explain about the requirements for declaring a band on attacks and the fact that you don't do so on blocks.
@@seandun7083 “treated as if it’s one creature *in* combat” a removal effect would be a non-combat effect and not care about the banding. Also for the purposes of handling combat phase state based actions, treating my 7 blocking squirrels with banding as if it was one creature makes no mechanical difference. The banding for blockers only cares about other blocking creatures that are also blocking the same creature, so my 7 squirrel “band” would all have to be blocking the same creature anyway, so pretending it’s a single 7/7 for the sake of combat damage works. Banding essentially does 2 things: First, it allows you to group creatures together in combat, and second, it gives you control of how combat damage is assigned to that group instead of your opponent like they normally would be able to.
I honestly love Banding… I think it is stronger than you describe in this video because you can essentially trade a weak creature for one of your opponents stronger ones..
I built a commander deck that used the bands with legends lands. It was a Selesnia lure deck. Very janky but when it did it's thing it basically turned into a one sided board wipe during each time i attacked.
Arcane spells and "Splice into arcane", came out in one set and one set only. Card designers called it a parasitic mechanic in that it only ever worked with arcane cards and didnt work with cards outside of the set. Near the release date they realized that it should of been "splice into instant" so that it wasnt so limited in capability without designing more cards that only worked with itself.
Great video, just a tip regarding the audio recording, I advise putting a 100hz roll-off on the voice overlay. At 8:54 there is a very noticeable rumble and knocking in the 30-40 hz range which was very noticeable in my full spectrum listening environment. Usually this low frequency isn't needed for voice and can also mask accidental pops and booms that occur from shaking the table or a mic arm.
That would be a cool one to see again. I guess they are just a bit cautious about putting that much removal on creatures when they aren't forced to by having a set that is entirely creatures like Legions was.
Thing is, they could explore Culumative Upkeep even more. (Triggered abilities that helps others, additive effects if it leaves play, etc.). I feel the same way about Fading as well, mechanics that were never fully fleshed out.
Another mechanic we see very little of lately is Protection. Not sure if it's supposed to be gone altogether, but it does sorta have the problem of having a large paragraph of italic text when explained
Games as old as MTG or Yu-Gi-Oh have a lot of weird old cards and mechanics. Not too surprising since they were basically inventing a new genre of game so they wouldn't have had much experience yet to know when an idea actually works or not. Ante is probably the strangest one as I can't imagine that even in the early days, people actually were willing to gamble their cards away like that.
In all actuality, the "gambling laws" argument never flew. In the early days, the lawyers were far more cautious. But really, no police or gambling commission were going to kick open the doors. Because the fact that you're playing a game for money at all IS ALREADY GAMBLING. The ante is a player to player agreement, outside the control of the host of the event.
I always thought it would be cool to make a card called "Boseiju, who withers" where it gets a -1/-1 every upkeep since boseiju is a tree but I guess they already did that with aboroth lol
With banding, since the attacker determined how combat damage was dealt instead of the blocker it could actually be insanely overpowered particularly with something like a 1/3 (or several 1/3s) banded with a strong attacker. Treat that 1/3 like an ablative +1/+3 counter so you had to deal 3 damage MORE than the toughness of the strong attacker to make any progress. If you did less than that the attacker could split 2 damage onto the Benalish infantry and the rest onto the big monster and lose neither. If you can muster 3 damage more than the big attacker's toughness then all damage piles on the 1/3 and you knock off the the +1/+3 counter. This did come with a caveat though in that if you split damage across multiple bands to prevent losing creatures you were priming yourself to suffer the greatest of pyroclasms (deals two damage to all creatures on the table) of all time and as pyroclasm was quite prevalent at the time this was no small threat.
0:10 For a half-second I thought you said Daunt and were gonna talk about that, which may be a real keyword spoiled in Mystery Booster 2 based on an existing set of words already in use on cards.
I like to see Ante brought back but affecting player's side boards instead. Might make competitive play even more twisted = "they only won b/c they use a card from my sideboard" 😂
I started playing in Revised and I swear I don't understand the confusion around banding. It's powerful and simple, and for some reason everyone hated it.
I guess I'm the only one who kinda liked Banding back in the day. Not that I ever used it to its full potential (I was 7 when Magic came out and it would be another decade and a half before I grokked the rules enough to actually deckbuild instead of just collect the pretty pictures), but I always thought it was kinda neat. I would love to see some of the Ante cards redesigned to just have the player take temporary control rather than just keep the card, because they're flavorful as hell. I kinda miss landwalk.
A creature with banding, if you can make it indestructible, can be the bodyguard of any one of your other creatures when they are attacking. If it always takes all the damage things like deathtouch and double-strike doesn't really matter as the banding creature will eat all that damage. Sure, you could go through the process of making as many creatures as you can indestructible, but with a banding creature it can escort any one creature. If you slso give everything trample, say with Garrux Uprising, what does it matter if they are blocked as a single or two different attackers? Banding has a use, though it is very niche. Easiest way to to accomplish this is to cast the white aura spell Cooperation on a creature that already has indestructible.
I may be talking out of my butt here, but I'm pretty sure Fear and Intimidate and landwalk were cut not to reduce unblockable creatures (given blue still gets a bunch of them today) but more so that they are unblockable only in certain matchups
If you miss the cumulative upkeep trigger nowdays, your opp gets to choose whether it's added back onto the stack or if you just completely missed it for the turn, but the card won't get sacrificed.
A deck i wish i can really build a strong deck with is the leveling mechanic, the idea of creatures that level up through counters to get stronger and gain new abilities sounds cool to me, sadly there is no level up commamder, so prismatic bridge will have to do
There are a few that I'm nostalgic for that I'd love to see more. Devotion from Theros. We saw it in Theros Beyond Death but anything that rewards you for staying mono colour just does something for me. Chroma is a mechanic that could've been in the video but I didn't have enough I wanted to say about it but I like it. Delve is another contender for this spot. We haven't seen it fully done since Tarkir block but holy crap, it is too powerful. Like Treasure Cruise is 8 mana and still warped formats. I'd love to get more of it but I don't expect it anytime soon.
What about rampage I was one that saw very small amount of actual cards with it The one I believe I remember is craw giant or claw giant I believe it was a 6-3 or an 8-3 rampage 2 and costed six. I was a little surprised it wasn't there and fear is still seen and regeneration is also still seen but those two as you said aren't seem very often. Hey there's even a new assassin's Creed card that gives all your characters fear so there is that
Worth noting that cloak is power crept manifest, not morph. The difference being that morph cards morph themselves, while manifest/cloak do it to other cards.
Regenerate made more sense in the pre-stack era, when damage was applied in a special step at the end of a spell chain or combat, and then there was a special step following that specifically for damage prevention and regenerate effects. Not saying that system was better.... just that Regenerate made more sense in that context. Also, anyone who took Gotcha that seriously completely missed the point of Unglued and Unhinged.
First commander deck i ever made (back when the format was still technically Elder Dragon Highlander still) was an Ayisha Tanaka banding deck. Forced my playgroup to learn how banding works, despite it not being good at all
I'm pretty sure I have an enchantment in my collection that gives a target creature Cumulative Upkeep, which seems like a decent enough strategy, if only as a stall tactic; put it on an opponent's creature, and they either A) Pay the price to keep it on the board, B) Let the crrature die, or C) Use a removal on it.
So basically, ante cards are usually theft but with extra steps... on top of a gambling mechanic that removes cards from the game. Who thought this was a good idea?
In an Izzet Commander deck, Braid of Fire works really well with 'Cheat for Flash' (ex. Leline of Anticipation, Gandalf, Friend of the Shire, or Negall, Stormrunner) Makes using that mana a lot easier.
My personal favorite commutative upkeep card would be hibernation. And put it on the battlefield, so basically I return you get yourself whatever creature you want and it progressively gets bigger and more threatening, and if you'd rather play the creature in your hand and get rid of hibernation then so be it.
Yes but bending is even more complicated because of two other keywords Trample and death touch If one of your creatures has death touch that is in the band and one of your creatures has trample how it will work is killing damage has to be assigned first so you allocate the death touch damage to be applied and then all of the creature with trample doze through but that only accounts for the deathtouch creatures power Basically you have to block with a additional creature for each one of the death touch creatures power to get into the trampled damage Also when a band is blocking trample is the problematic interaction Because they are blocking as a group Bandung has a weird interaction were you actually can assign more damage then killing damage without having trample hit you How this works is the entire band has the combined toughness to block the creature with trample then you assign all of the damage to one creature technically there wasn't any assess damage but because of how it was assigned it doesn't travel over It made the thing more complicated than even that but these are some rough rulings that I have seen judges actually put forth on Banding
I remember playing with my first set, Saviors of Kamigawa (or was it Betrayers?) I used a black/green spirit deck that revolved around Soulshift, where you would revive a creature with a converted mana cost of at least one less than the creature that got destroyed. I feel like that could be extremely powerful if used right, but haven't seen it since...
Cumulative Upkeep should make a comeback, but be more creative. There's one where you have to put cards from an opponent's graveyard on the bottom of their library. This is actually upside against graveyard decks.
Surprisingly, Maro puts it at a storm scale of 5 meaning that it needs the right conditions to work but he's optimistic about it returning. It is a cool mechanic that'd be interesting to see them explore more but it is definitely a victim of commander becoming the face of the game.
The Storm Scale ONLY refers to standard legal sets though. So the only card printed that breaks the scale that gives storm or annihilator is Ral, Crackling Wit in Bloomburrow.
1. The reason why Banding was "taken out" was it just made sense for a player to block how they want and with what they want. So in truth Banding was simply given to all creatures. 2. Ante is pretty self explanatory. Basically this was gambling. And as many know, gambling is illegal in quite a few states, provinces and countries. And to top this all off. This was originally marketed towards kids. On top of what was already said. 3. Regenerate is kinda funny as this is more or less due to power creep. In its infancy Regenerate was really just used for combat tricks. To be fair, I feel like the argument of "annoying shield" is just dumb when Totem Armor exists. If anything this was to appease the Deathtouch fanboys 4. Intimidate was actually fun and really didn't get why it was chopped. When Landwalk exists. It was simply a different way of doing so. Bring this back!! 5. Gotcha is an "Un" mechanic so duh it is prolly never coming back. 6. Ah Cumulative Upkeep, the bastard child of old school magic. The reason why this isn't around? Proliferate. With so many ways to just add counters to these cards. They are simply unplayable now. Sure a Hex Parasite, Hex Mage and the like. But they are SO niche
I don't think you understand what banding does. A group of creatures in a band forces any creatures that blocks a member of the band to block every creature in it. Currently, creatures can't normally block more than a single creature. Banding also allows you to choose how your opponent divides their damage. They have removed both intimidate and land walk for the same reasons. They have also tried to reduce how much protection they use for some similar reasons, but that one is much more popular than the others.
As the geniuses at WotC kept adding dumber and more broken mechanics to the game, they had to get rid of some of the older ones because they were worried that newer players might not be able to adapt and they needed to expand their market to get people hooked early and hard. The game is a hollow shell of what it once was.
Disagree on "Banding" being bad. If you attack me with a giant trampler, and I block with everything and have a creature with Banding, then I control where your trampler's damage goes, and I can put all of your damage in to a 1/1 and have no damage trample over. I use it all the time.
In no universe was WotC worried about being sued over gambling. It's not gambling in the legal sense. Gambling is when a person bets or risks something of value (like money) based on a chance outcome that is out of their control or influence with the understanding that they will either gain increased value or lose their original value determined by the specific outcome. I'm sure given this definition, I don't have to explain why ante doesn't fit the bill. At the end of the day, weather it feels like it or not sometimes, MTG is a skill and strategic game, where player input is vital and necessary. Now, it definitely had a slightly sus look to it, but WotC has never been shy in saying their mtg products, especially in early magic, were geared to a teen audience, not kids. I think it was due to the bad PR, but they were never ganna be sued over that.
A couple people are getting confused here so I want to put this out there. These are all mechanics that Mark Rosewater has given a storm scale rating of 10 meaning, in his words, "I never say never, but this would require a major miracle."
There is likely a handful of keywords that aren't included that could be but he hasn't given them a storm scale rating. There is no use in arguing that a mechanic "isn't that bad" when I am citing THE head designer for Magic: the Gathering.
I wonder how much the Storm Scale means given that Stotm itself got reprinted with Bloomburrow Ral.
@@tochoXK3 A 10 means no cards in standard unless there is a major miracle. I think the major miracle is that Magic is now allowing guest appearances from some keywords. This way they can do some flashy things but they hopefully don't get too out of hand
Fear is such a flavorful mechanic. Intimidate is not. Why would a green creature frighten a black/white/blue/red creature but not another green one?
The flavor of Fear is that black and artifact creatures lack this emotion and it just fits so well.
@@Sepp_Tember I think it makes sense most for green, with the idea that a big beast creature would want to challenge another big beast. But other colors would not want any of that smoke
@@MireValethis logic can apply for any big creature of any color. isnt there a mechanic where a creature cant be blocked except by those over a certain power?
And there's a enchantment that gives "white fear", is the same rule, but swapping black for white.
I thought the set Outlaws of thunder junction, should have had all horses have "Horsemanship" lol
@@raykoonce5474 I absolutely agree. As weird / dumb as it sounds... It would have been funny and a clever nod to the past.
They can't give characters on horseback horsemanship for one set, because it would make no sense why thousands of creatures from other sets, that are also mounted, wouldn't have the ability.
They probably regret creating this mechanic in the first place for Three Kingdoms.
Most deprecated mechanics were replaced with understandable reasons. Mechanically, i'll like to see Shroud from time to time. It's Hexprooof with a pretty smart built in drawback and i prefer it over Ward. Flavorwise, Regenerate and Fear/Intimidate are really evokative and it's a shame they didn't work out.
I agree with the shroud comment. They made ward to be the fair way to do hexproof, when shroud did a great job at it. I do think there are a lot of magic players that miss that shroud stops everyone, just in the same way that a lot of players miss that protection also protects a creature against your own auras.
And yeah, its a shame when we lose words for keywords that could be something cooler. Personally, I think the word Rampage could evoke something gruul where its like trample but then it does something extra/different.
@@HarrisontheManaDorkI think Mark Rosewater has said that (newer) players had trouble with shroud. They kept enchanting their own shroud creatures for instance. In that sense hexproof is the 'fixed' shroud. But both mechanics lead to less interactive and that's why we got ward... oh well.
@marcodaddario3965 they have sort of brought back regenerate only now they spell it out like "Cost - tap this creature, it gains indestructible until end of turn."
@@marcodaddario3965 Shroud was just too confusing for many players and admittedly, the biggest continual confusion comes in the way that auras can attach to creatures with Shroud, but not when they're cast. It also feels bad to not be able to target your own things and Hexproof was the way to be less confusing, but also clearly too broken
I do believe they are still using Shroud in universes beyond releases on occasion. It's not frequent and it may be unsatisfactory for some people.
I recall a card that my friends and I treated as a "Gotcha" card, even though it wasn't, and that was Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table). Every time someone said "Goblin SWAT Team" (slaps the table), whether they controlled Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table) or not, we all had to slap the table within 5 seconds. Otherwise, each player who controlled a Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table) would be allowed to put a +1 counter on each their Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table). It was absolutely the wrong way to play Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table), but we all loved playing Goblin SWAT Team (slaps the table) like that anyway.
(Slaps the table)
Kek
A major issue with fear, intimidate, and landwalks is that either you were open and couldn't block at all, or you were safe and the cards were blank, at the deckbuilding phase. It's not fun to have a creature in your deck be useless, and it's not fun to see your opponent have an unsolvable problem because you accidentally played the wrong one of the five colors.
Reminds me of one of the siller and really not good decks I made during ice age barbarian guides and weather vain (had a word before that began with A. but been too long can't remember) make an opponents land snow covered with weather vain. the barbarian guides give something snow-covered land walk. It did work but was slow and not good.
@@OFSheep on the other hand, having direct damage creatures makes it easier to trigger "if dealt damage to a player" type effects, and makes opponents have to have direct counters instead of JUST having bigger badder monsters than you. It creates more modes of play and more strategies that can be used.
And the pass through type creatures were almost always balanced to at least be low on attack.
The funniest thing about ante is it wasn't even banned strictly for the gambling aspect. There are nine cards with ante and if they weren't banned you could play four copies of each of them. If you're not playing a game with ante then you remove them from your deck before the game starts but after your deck is checked if it's legal. Your 60 card deck is now 24 cards, combo city.
Yes, exactly this. You build a small, specific wombo-combo like Channel/Fireball or whatever, and half your deck doesn't make it into your Library on Turn 1. Doubling your odds to draw the win condition is a strong strategy.
@@odarkeq It's way more than doubling your odds. Not only is 24 less than half of 60, it's not a linear relationship either. Rough rule of thumb is that you have about a 15% chance of drawing both parts of a two-card combo in your opener in a 60 card deck with 4 of each card, not counting mulligans (as mulligan rules have changed over the years and heavily complicate the math). That goes to about 50% in a 24-card deck if my back-of-the-envelope estimate is right. If you extend that to 10 cards instead of 7 it gets even sillier.
Also note that the original rules were 40 card decks. It wasn't 60 cards until the first major rules revision. I was a judge during alpha/beta, the original rules also didn't have 4 card limits.
Within the first few months we were already experimenting with restricting number of copies, expanding the deck size limits and discussing if cards needed to be banned. Ante cards were the first thing to be banned to prevent the exploit you mentioned, even before the power 9 were restricted to one of each.
@@Vincent_Beers Interesting insight!
Couldn't you just say that your deck had to still be legal after they were removed?
Ironically, the Storm Scale 10 mechanics for power level like storm and dredge and eminence do get occasionally reprinted. But not banding!
@@robmarney pretty sure Rosewater had banding at 10 and bands with other at 11
Banding is a fun mechanic, not a good one but there's some interesting things you can do with it... Anything that triggers when it's blocked or takes damage works well with it Tolarian enchanter is a favorite of mine. There's stuff that kills things when blocking, stuff that draws you cards... As for remade versions of it I believe Mutate an equally confusing keyword could qualify as a version of banding, several creatures combining their abilities to attack as one.
It definitely a neat mechanic but both it and mutate have too many moving parts.
You start to understand it and throw a wrench into the mix and you need an old judge and a new judge.
You can totally dominate a game of 40 cards with it. I have a unlimited vandalism hero deck that gets crazy strong at no time.
It would be interesting to make a cube that lets banding shine. Focus entirely on creatures, combat tricks, and other things that put tactical play in the combat phase front and center.
@@Oneiroclast you can do it with a commander deck if you use goad and lure effects.
@@HarrisontheManaDork The bigger issue isn't actually Banding, but the way Bands With Other used to work. See, it didn't work the way every sensible person thinks it works, which is that a card that says "Bands with other Dinosaurs" can band with other dinosaurs. Nononono, that would make too much sense. Instead, it meant that it could band with other cards that had "Bands with other Dinosaurs" - and of course, it could join a band of Banding creatures.
WotC has finally, for some reason, fixed it - literally as of Magic 2010 - so that Old Fogey can now, in fact, freely Band with other Dinosaurs and not just other Old Fogeys. I'm not clear why they felt it necessary to fix it at that point in time, since it had long since been left by the wayside.
If you think I'm joking go grab a copy of the comp rules from 10th edition or older and look it up.
Banding is bad enough, but "Bands with other..." is a whole 'nother level of confusing since it, contrary to the naming, isn't just a limited form of Banding. There are subtle differences that change how it operates.
Funny enough though I personally misunderstood and screwed up mechanics all the time banding was one of the few me and my friends got right from the get go never had problems with it then I moved and found out that no one at all where I moved could figure it out. Not sure how people get confused by it the examples in the rules for banding alweas made perfect sense to me. A little wordy but perfectly understandable. Not that there were not other things in the rule book that we had trouble with there deffenitly was. Just not with banding.
Ooooh a cube draft with ante would be wild! I need to make that happen.
I don't think you understand what ante is, it wouldn't even make sense in cube draft.
Sure, it would!
If you win the card, it goes into your card pool.
I'm actually surprised that regenerate is dead. I played back in the day and even remember some of the games having the ability. Same with fear.
Ante and Shandalar (the Microprose MTG world) were amazing together
i wish i could get this game to run so bad i cant even get it working on an old windoes xp laptop, DAMN YOU DAVE AND YOUR EXTRA COOL TIMER THAT DOESNT WORK
The reason why Ante was banned from magic is because back in the 90’s when WotC was expanding their market by going to places like Brazil where gambling is illegal. That is why they had to give up on it.
Interesting...I thought it would've been to stop brawls from occurring in schoolyards over losing your best card.
Well, and also most places in the US?
Another mechanic that could be a good example of deprecated mechanics is infect from Scars block. And how poison counters kinda went full circle from a fixed amount per damage (like pit Scorpion or Virulent Sliver), to infect and then nerfed back to fixed numbers in the toxic mechanic.
Also, another reason why landwalk fear and intimidate were retired isn't just the unblockablity, it's that it is a very matchup dependent mechanic. Esther your opponent plays the right color to Block and the ability is almost useless, or they don't and it's way too strong
Infect is a funny beast on its own too because infect came out in 2010, but poison counters have been around since the 90s. They've been constantly trying to figure out how to make poison work in a way that isn't too strong that it is broken, but isn't so weak that no one plays it.
In today's scene, infect is balanced. Getting poison counters on someone tends to make you a target, since they're almost impossible to remove and usually you're the only one with it. If the Atraxa player plays a Prologue to Phyresis, suddenly everyone's attention is on the Atraxa player and getting them gone.
While yes there are combos that can be used to instantly poison someone to death (Ziatora the Incinerator getting infect can be a big problem if you get something big to fling), that's more of a game-winning combo, something that can usually require several turns to set up (in my case, I run Prossh, so my opponents have allowed me to get three heavy duty value pieces out and keep them out for at least a turn cycle)
I hope Level up returns in a future set.
Aside from Hexdrinker from Modern Horizons 1, it's only even been printed in Rise of the Eldrazi.
Just the keyword itself sounds very RPG-like. The main problem is that you have to be willing to sink mana into it to level it up. Which can be bad if your opponent has a removal spell with your creature's name on it.
And there are so many cards that would be way easier to show if it was templated with “level up”. See Surge Engine
Yeah I found out about level up through hexdrinker(I was going to build a snake tribal deck) I also wish there was a level up themed commander I can use, I have prismatic bridge as my commander for now, tho I might see if I can do without red and go atraxa
There are a couple keywords we'll never see printed again because they literally deleted them from the comprehensive rules.
The first such keyword is "Threshold", which might be confusing as Threshold is coming back in Bluoomburrow. But that is Threshold as an "ability word" instead of a keyword. Ability words are just a flavor name a cards abilities, often unifying them across multiple cards. Introduced in Saviors of Kamigawa with abilities like "Channel". When it was printed in Odyssey block, Threshold was a keyword that said "You have threshold as long as you have seven or more cards in your graveyard." It was changed to an ability word because, honestly it was just less confusing to write the rules text out every time. So this keyword being deleted is more of a technicality than anything else. Threshold is still alive and well in spirit.
The second deleted keyword of is "Landhome". Like Landwalk, Landhome called out a landtype, almost exclusively islands, and read "This creature can't attack unless the defending player controls a (land). Sacrifice this creature if you don't control a (land)." Really old heads will recognize this as the Sea Serpent ability, commonly found on early cards depicting sea monsters that logically couldn't survive on land. This was the first time Magic created a keyword to replace commonly used rules text. Landhome. Not Haste. Not Fear or Vigilance or Reach or Flash. Landhome. That was the keyword that Magic really needed.
Landhome was only printed in Mirage block, and only on a couple of cards. The problems with Landhome were multiple. 1) It was pretty much exclusive to Islands. Sure, there was a rare Foresthome or Mountainhome creature, but those were mostly novelty. 2) The ability is 100% all drawback. Like Echo, Fading/Vanishing or Cumulative Upkeep, players prefer abilities that have an upside and deeply dislike abilities that feel like a punishment. 3) The Landhome ability was already on it's way out. Sacrificing your creature because your opponent Stone Rained your last Island was a major "Feels Bad" moment, so by Tempest block, WotC dropped the sacrifice clause and with it, the usefulness of the Landhome keyword. So they deleted the keyword and reverted all the cards with Landhome back to spelling out the rules text.
Designers kept using the attack restriction for sea monsters for another decade or so. Until they dropped it all together a decade later, when they realized that players prefer smashing face with their giant creatures more than they cared about the illogical flavor.
They still occasionally print an Islandhome (or Islandhome-styled) card without the Islandhome keyword, but it's very rare, and a lot of them are in "remastered" sets. If you want to exclude those, Sealock Monster is in Theros which is fairly recent, and has an inbuilt way around the restriction.
Fifth edition had islandhome (sea serpent)
Bring back cumulative upkeep on some cards that do stuff when they hit the graveyard. A black creature that's strong for its cost but sucks up more and more of your mana until you let it die would be cool if it got to kill something when it dies. You've got an interesting choice there.
That could have been a way to balance Braid of Fire again in a post-mana burn world. Something like "when it leaves the battlefield, you take damage equal to its cumulative upkeep," so you have to consider how big you want this pile of red mana every turn to get before it potentially explodes on you.
This is a black card from ice age that let you draw a card for each age counter on it, but the cumulative upkeep was one life.
It's actually fitting for Cumulative Upkeep to die in the sister set to the one it was born in.
It was dead before then, but they brought it back for a single card in that set; mainly for this thematic reason.
I built a deck based on Cumulative upkeep, I had found a card online, but it was a fake card. It was super convincing. It read: Universal Acceleration, "Cumulative upkeep --- Take an additional upkeep step after this one. Universal Acceleration's cumulative upkeep does not trigger during extra upkeep steps." this meant every turn that passes, you would have an additional upkeep trigger over the previous turn. So I started building around upkeep triggers. I hadn't heard of cumulative upkeep prior to this, so I had no frame of reference to realize how broken this was from the onset. It wasn't until I tried to find the card for sale that I realized my error. however, I started searching for combos to simulate this effect. so Paradox haze became the cornerstone, and spells that allowed me to copy enchantments. Xur the enchanter became the commander as many of those spells, including haze itself were 3 mana or less.
The deck has a lot of room for improvement, but it's a ton of fun.
Was glad to hear Soulbond mentioned. Everyone hated when I played that deck because no one understood the mechanic.
Banding was good in Limited but not in Constructed. In Constructed, you often want to leak damage through to chip away at your opponent’s life total. The only reason why the rules were confusing was because it worked differently on offense or defense and there was no internet back then.
But back in the day I often could explain Banding to newbies in one sentence.
Banding was simple when games were mostly combat and 10 other things weren't happening in response. You only needed to see it used and it made sense.
You mean before you could do a bazillion things in response.
@@xerty5502 Hey if you're drafting in a pod and you draft "a bazillion things in response" cards, more power to you. Obviously you can't get more than a few combat trick instants in a sealed deck.
@@Rorschachqp more talking about before they changed how the stack worked and removed interrupts
@@xerty5502 Which is important in Constructed but for Banding, it doesn't come up much in Limited. But if you're saying that's why no one plays it in Constructed, yes.
Banding is extremely broken. Because of how Damage Dealt is managed in Magic, having Banding meant that you could make all of the damage of a card go to one of the blockers. So if you attacked with a 10/10 and a 1/1, and your oponente blocked with an 11/11, you didn't made an even trade. You said "I assign all of your 11 combat damage points to the 1/1", and you kept the 10/10. BTW, this also meant that if you blocked using Banding, you effectively negated TRAMPLE, because once again, you negated the attackers ability to assign combat damage. You could also divide the damage in parts, instead of choosing order of creatures like having multiple blockers. (Ex. If you attack with a 3/3 and your oponent blocks with a 1/3A, a 1/1B and a 1/2C, if you attacked A first, you only killed that. If youattacked B and then A, you only killed B, if you attacked C, then B, then A, you killed everything EXCEPT A. Well. In the contrary way, with Banding, if you are the blocker in this, you can choose to assign 2 damage to A and 1 damage to C, instead of choosing "order of blocking", which is not the same. This way, all of your creatures are alive).
While Banding is shamelessly complicated in text with no real reason, learning how it actually makes the game work is a good way to understand game mechanics like Combat and Damage Steps and Assignation of Damage.
Getting rid of Banding is such a crime... shield knights and walls could benefit so much from the mechanic. Being able to band as a group and block a serious threat, kill it without losing everything? That's so cool.
But seeing as it's been 30 years, how did it work with rampage?
Most of this list, ti me, is a reminder of how much more fun the game was way back when... im glad people enjoy the game now but nostalgia is a bitxh and I love things like landwalk, banding, regenerate, etc... hell, I feel like the older cards were better for our vocabulary.
Banding is really good for blocking if your opponent runs a lot of big tramplers because you can choose to assign all of the damage to whichever one of your creatures you need the least. You can block a a 90/90 trampler with three 2/2 creatures and have all ninety damage hit only one of them, perhaps one you've made indestructible, and if one member of your band has deathtouch, then the giant monster is probably dead.
I remember the original mechanics for the "Kor" creatures from the Tempest (Rath) block, which were humanoids that could redirect damage to or from another creature you controlled. That mechanic was quickly dropped because it ended up being way too powerful and tedious to use.
Banding certainly has use cases, but they are all so niche that banding is never a reason to play a card, and there are no banding cards printed worth playing in pretty much every format. Some extremely niche use like protecting an all-in commander from infinite sized blockers may exist, but there are probably always better, more flexible cards to run instead.
@@pidgeotroll I love using banding to shut down green trample-heavy EDH decks.
@@ElPayasoMalo Thing is, there are a ton of ways to shut down green trample-heavy EDH decks, ways that are more flexible and better agianst other strategies too.
@@pidgeotroll Sure, but the fun of EDH is seeing unexpected tactics and weird cards you wouldn't see in other formats. Nobody expects the Banding Inquisition!
Having played in the release of Unhinged...Gotcha was so much fun. At some point in the night, whenever someone yelled "Gotcha" in a game, the whole room would respond "Ayy!" This lead to a few extra Gotchas from laughter. If you take a silverbordered game so seriously that you are worried about Gotcha, you kinda missed the point
I'm happy to hear that it actually served its purpose of some light hearted fun for some groups. It seems like a cool thing for silver border but I could definitely see Maro's reasoning behind cutting it
Banding is actually really strong. The reason why it shouldn’t return is because of the complicated rules that define how to actually form a band that even spawned the „bands with“ variant.
I don't get why people think banding is difficult. You read the oracle text, right? It isn't more difficult than that. The band blocks or is blocked as one creature, and the controller of the band gets to decide how damage is dealt among the band.
Banding in seconds:
Pretend the entire band is one creature
Until damage dealing time
Honestly one of the most fascinating old keywords I have seen is "Epic" which was printed on a single spell for each color. It had the effect of copying itself every turn at the cost of you no longer being able to cast any other spell.
I love “spell counter” in casual silver bordered commander. It makes for fun table dynamics.
As soon as I saw this I said "banding". Haven't played in many years, but knew that would be one of them.
no Rampage? 🥺
Banding is easily explained as “my group of creatures is treated as if it’s one creature in combat and I get to choose how to assign combat damage dealt to that group instead of how you would normally be able to”
If they rephrase some of the reminder text I think it could be possible to bring it back but it’s definitely not strong enough to really want it back anyway…
Not quite. Your creatures don't share abilities and a single removal spell won't kill all of them.
You also need to explain about the requirements for declaring a band on attacks and the fact that you don't do so on blocks.
@@seandun7083 “treated as if it’s one creature *in* combat” a removal effect would be a non-combat effect and not care about the banding. Also for the purposes of handling combat phase state based actions, treating my 7 blocking squirrels with banding as if it was one creature makes no mechanical difference. The banding for blockers only cares about other blocking creatures that are also blocking the same creature, so my 7 squirrel “band” would all have to be blocking the same creature anyway, so pretending it’s a single 7/7 for the sake of combat damage works.
Banding essentially does 2 things: First, it allows you to group creatures together in combat, and second, it gives you control of how combat damage is assigned to that group instead of your opponent like they normally would be able to.
I honestly love Banding… I think it is stronger than you describe in this video because you can essentially trade a weak creature for one of your opponents stronger ones..
I built a commander deck that used the bands with legends lands. It was a Selesnia lure deck. Very janky but when it did it's thing it basically turned into a one sided board wipe during each time i attacked.
Arcane spells and "Splice into arcane", came out in one set and one set only. Card designers called it a parasitic mechanic in that it only ever worked with arcane cards and didnt work with cards outside of the set. Near the release date they realized that it should of been "splice into instant" so that it wasnt so limited in capability without designing more cards that only worked with itself.
Great video, just a tip regarding the audio recording, I advise putting a 100hz roll-off on the voice overlay. At 8:54 there is a very noticeable rumble and knocking in the 30-40 hz range which was very noticeable in my full spectrum listening environment. Usually this low frequency isn't needed for voice and can also mask accidental pops and booms that occur from shaking the table or a mic arm.
This is the most specific and oddly helpful advice I've ever received. Thank you lol
I haven't played MTG in years, so I don't know, if it is used again, but I was sure "provoke" would be on this list.
That would be a cool one to see again. I guess they are just a bit cautious about putting that much removal on creatures when they aren't forced to by having a set that is entirely creatures like Legions was.
We almost always played Ante in the lunchroom during alpha through ice age. Then we stopped because people were sick of losing dope cards
Thing is, they could explore Culumative Upkeep even more. (Triggered abilities that helps others, additive effects if it leaves play, etc.).
I feel the same way about Fading as well, mechanics that were never fully fleshed out.
No one ever talks about provoke anymore. Shadow’s another one
Another mechanic we see very little of lately is Protection. Not sure if it's supposed to be gone altogether, but it does sorta have the problem of having a large paragraph of italic text when explained
Contract from Below and Demonic Attorney were S-tier mvps in Shandalar
Games as old as MTG or Yu-Gi-Oh have a lot of weird old cards and mechanics. Not too surprising since they were basically inventing a new genre of game so they wouldn't have had much experience yet to know when an idea actually works or not. Ante is probably the strangest one as I can't imagine that even in the early days, people actually were willing to gamble their cards away like that.
2:00 I love banding. I used it with most of my decks. I even made a Benalish Hero exclusive deck before they limited it to 4 cards of any type.
You forgot to mention sacrifice, as for burry, a sacrified creature could not be regenerated.
Ante was marvelous. When MtG first started, it was about the risk of losing a choice card. Then punks complained about losing, and so it went away.
Also gambling laws.
In all actuality, the "gambling laws" argument never flew. In the early days, the lawyers were far more cautious. But really, no police or gambling commission were going to kick open the doors. Because the fact that you're playing a game for money at all IS ALREADY GAMBLING. The ante is a player to player agreement, outside the control of the host of the event.
I always thought it would be cool to make a card called "Boseiju, who withers" where it gets a -1/-1 every upkeep since boseiju is a tree but I guess they already did that with aboroth lol
With banding, since the attacker determined how combat damage was dealt instead of the blocker it could actually be insanely overpowered particularly with something like a 1/3 (or several 1/3s) banded with a strong attacker. Treat that 1/3 like an ablative +1/+3 counter so you had to deal 3 damage MORE than the toughness of the strong attacker to make any progress. If you did less than that the attacker could split 2 damage onto the Benalish infantry and the rest onto the big monster and lose neither. If you can muster 3 damage more than the big attacker's toughness then all damage piles on the 1/3 and you knock off the the +1/+3 counter.
This did come with a caveat though in that if you split damage across multiple bands to prevent losing creatures you were priming yourself to suffer the greatest of pyroclasms (deals two damage to all creatures on the table) of all time and as pyroclasm was quite prevalent at the time this was no small threat.
0:10 For a half-second I thought you said Daunt and were gonna talk about that, which may be a real keyword spoiled in Mystery Booster 2 based on an existing set of words already in use on cards.
I like to see Ante brought back but affecting player's side boards instead. Might make competitive play even more twisted = "they only won b/c they use a card from my sideboard" 😂
I started playing in Revised and I swear I don't understand the confusion around banding. It's powerful and simple, and for some reason everyone hated it.
Herald of Leshrac is fun. Its just such a fun design. Such a nice way to handle Cumulative Upkeep.
I guess I'm the only one who kinda liked Banding back in the day. Not that I ever used it to its full potential (I was 7 when Magic came out and it would be another decade and a half before I grokked the rules enough to actually deckbuild instead of just collect the pretty pictures), but I always thought it was kinda neat.
I would love to see some of the Ante cards redesigned to just have the player take temporary control rather than just keep the card, because they're flavorful as hell.
I kinda miss landwalk.
A creature with banding, if you can make it indestructible, can be the bodyguard of any one of your other creatures when they are attacking. If it always takes all the damage things like deathtouch and double-strike doesn't really matter as the banding creature will eat all that damage. Sure, you could go through the process of making as many creatures as you can indestructible, but with a banding creature it can escort any one creature. If you slso give everything trample, say with Garrux Uprising, what does it matter if they are blocked as a single or two different attackers? Banding has a use, though it is very niche.
Easiest way to to accomplish this is to cast the white aura spell Cooperation on a creature that already has indestructible.
Bruh banding on blocking is OP. You can move all 100 damage onto 1 creature. No overspill
11:54 Ha, I run Karplusan minotaurs in my multi-player flip-a-coin deck that features krark's thumb, etc. Lol ahh good times.
Banding is cool! Just pair weak banders with high power guys, they could be 4/1, for example. Kill their big guys using small banders
I may be talking out of my butt here, but I'm pretty sure Fear and Intimidate and landwalk were cut not to reduce unblockable creatures (given blue still gets a bunch of them today) but more so that they are unblockable only in certain matchups
Banding is less confusing than mutate.
You went to worlds? Thanks for letting me remember Brad today.
Brad is actually the man who got me into Magic. He donated a box of welcome decks to my high school. He was a great guy and I miss him!
@@HarrisontheManaDork a great man indeed.
If you miss the cumulative upkeep trigger nowdays, your opp gets to choose whether it's added back onto the stack or if you just completely missed it for the turn, but the card won't get sacrificed.
Banding can be awesome. You can eat a Ball Lightning with a Timber Wolves for instance. Banding trumps trample.
This is the 1 time I heard the keyword ante and I can see why is never going back into the game
A deck i wish i can really build a strong deck with is the leveling mechanic, the idea of creatures that level up through counters to get stronger and gain new abilities sounds cool to me, sadly there is no level up commamder, so prismatic bridge will have to do
I am sad sometimes that saying "I cast Lure on Thicket Basilisk and move to combat" no longer causes the shudder of fear it once did.
Nah... but Gorgon's Flail on Prodigal Sorcerer makes people angry... especially with Freed from the Reel!
Why not cast Entangler on your Basilisk instead?
Are there any other keywords that haven't appeared in awhile that you want them to bring back?
There are a few that I'm nostalgic for that I'd love to see more.
Devotion from Theros. We saw it in Theros Beyond Death but anything that rewards you for staying mono colour just does something for me. Chroma is a mechanic that could've been in the video but I didn't have enough I wanted to say about it but I like it.
Delve is another contender for this spot. We haven't seen it fully done since Tarkir block but holy crap, it is too powerful. Like Treasure Cruise is 8 mana and still warped formats. I'd love to get more of it but I don't expect it anytime soon.
Shadow.
banding actually is very strong when being used for blocking. banding used effectively leads to stale board states and long games.
There was also psychic vortex: enchantment UU2, at the end of your turn, discard your hand and sacrifice a land. Cumulative upkeep: draw a card
I'm surprised I didn't see flanking or phasing in here. Was that because they were restricted to one block (Mirage)?
When a creature is in a band with two others attack alone, is it attacking alone or not. If so, Banding with Samurai could be interesting
No. The creatures don't count as one, it's just that a single creature can block all of them (but can't choose to block a single one individually).
Banding is highly underrated.
What about rampage I was one that saw very small amount of actual cards with it The one I believe I remember is craw giant or claw giant I believe it was a 6-3 or an 8-3 rampage 2 and costed six. I was a little surprised it wasn't there and fear is still seen and regeneration is also still seen but those two as you said aren't seem very often. Hey there's even a new assassin's Creed card that gives all your characters fear so there is that
Worth noting that cloak is power crept manifest, not morph. The difference being that morph cards morph themselves, while manifest/cloak do it to other cards.
Yeah. Disguise is the power crept morph.
I love that a 1/1 with Banding basically Fog's a creature with Trample 🍻
Regenerate made more sense in the pre-stack era, when damage was applied in a special step at the end of a spell chain or combat, and then there was a special step following that specifically for damage prevention and regenerate effects. Not saying that system was better.... just that Regenerate made more sense in that context.
Also, anyone who took Gotcha that seriously completely missed the point of Unglued and Unhinged.
First commander deck i ever made (back when the format was still technically Elder Dragon Highlander still) was an Ayisha Tanaka banding deck.
Forced my playgroup to learn how banding works, despite it not being good at all
Back when Mirage and Visions were new, we would completely ignore any rules text that had phasing b/c we just didn't understand it.
Dont think ive ever seen regenerate successfully used
Banding needs to be brought back it's not confusing at all
I'm pretty sure I have an enchantment in my collection that gives a target creature Cumulative Upkeep, which seems like a decent enough strategy, if only as a stall tactic; put it on an opponent's creature, and they either A) Pay the price to keep it on the board, B) Let the crrature die, or C) Use a removal on it.
1:51 banding could be interesting with like 0/7 and like 4/1 arcatype
It has always puzzled me how people struggle with understanding banding.
Gonna do the sharpie cube thing and try and get ante and banding in
So basically, ante cards are usually theft but with extra steps... on top of a gambling mechanic that removes cards from the game. Who thought this was a good idea?
In an Izzet Commander deck, Braid of Fire works really well with 'Cheat for Flash' (ex. Leline of Anticipation, Gandalf, Friend of the Shire, or Negall, Stormrunner) Makes using that mana a lot easier.
My personal favorite commutative upkeep card would be hibernation. And put it on the battlefield, so basically I return you get yourself whatever creature you want and it progressively gets bigger and more threatening, and if you'd rather play the creature in your hand and get rid of hibernation then so be it.
Yes but bending is even more complicated because of two other keywords
Trample and death touch
If one of your creatures has death touch that is in the band and one of your creatures has trample how it will work is killing damage has to be assigned first so you allocate the death touch damage to be applied and then all of the creature with trample doze through but that only accounts for the deathtouch creatures power
Basically you have to block with a additional creature for each one of the death touch creatures power to get into the trampled damage
Also when a band is blocking trample is the problematic interaction
Because they are blocking as a group Bandung has a weird interaction were you actually can assign more damage then killing damage without having trample hit you
How this works is the entire band has the combined toughness to block the creature with trample then you assign all of the damage to one creature technically there wasn't any assess damage but because of how it was assigned it doesn't travel over
It made the thing more complicated than even that but these are some rough rulings that I have seen judges actually put forth on Banding
I remember playing with my first set, Saviors of Kamigawa (or was it Betrayers?) I used a black/green spirit deck that revolved around Soulshift, where you would revive a creature with a converted mana cost of at least one less than the creature that got destroyed. I feel like that could be extremely powerful if used right, but haven't seen it since...
Cumulative Upkeep should make a comeback, but be more creative. There's one where you have to put cards from an opponent's graveyard on the bottom of their library. This is actually upside against graveyard decks.
Surprised "Grandeur" wasn't on that list.
Surprisingly, Maro puts it at a storm scale of 5 meaning that it needs the right conditions to work but he's optimistic about it returning.
It is a cool mechanic that'd be interesting to see them explore more but it is definitely a victim of commander becoming the face of the game.
@@HarrisontheManaDork yeah, they'd really need to put it on a legendary dude(s) that you could take multiples of like the Nazgul or 7 dwarves.
didnt they just did an out of place common legendary recently?
Remeber when MaRo introduced the Storm Scale and then printed more cards with Storm and Anihilator. Pepridge Farms remebers.
The Storm Scale ONLY refers to standard legal sets though. So the only card printed that breaks the scale that gives storm or annihilator is Ral, Crackling Wit in Bloomburrow.
I just made my first EDH deck a month ago and it’s a Marrow-Gnawer deck 😬
I would love an Ante Cube on Arena.
1. The reason why Banding was "taken out" was it just made sense for a player to block how they want and with what they want. So in truth Banding was simply given to all creatures.
2. Ante is pretty self explanatory. Basically this was gambling. And as many know, gambling is illegal in quite a few states, provinces and countries. And to top this all off. This was originally marketed towards kids. On top of what was already said.
3. Regenerate is kinda funny as this is more or less due to power creep. In its infancy Regenerate was really just used for combat tricks. To be fair, I feel like the argument of "annoying shield" is just dumb when Totem Armor exists. If anything this was to appease the Deathtouch fanboys
4. Intimidate was actually fun and really didn't get why it was chopped. When Landwalk exists. It was simply a different way of doing so. Bring this back!!
5. Gotcha is an "Un" mechanic so duh it is prolly never coming back.
6. Ah Cumulative Upkeep, the bastard child of old school magic. The reason why this isn't around? Proliferate. With so many ways to just add counters to these cards. They are simply unplayable now. Sure a Hex Parasite, Hex Mage and the like. But they are SO niche
I don't think you understand what banding does. A group of creatures in a band forces any creatures that blocks a member of the band to block every creature in it. Currently, creatures can't normally block more than a single creature.
Banding also allows you to choose how your opponent divides their damage.
They have removed both intimidate and land walk for the same reasons. They have also tried to reduce how much protection they use for some similar reasons, but that one is much more popular than the others.
As the geniuses at WotC kept adding dumber and more broken mechanics to the game, they had to get rid of some of the older ones because they were worried that newer players might not be able to adapt and they needed to expand their market to get people hooked early and hard. The game is a hollow shell of what it once was.
Disagree on "Banding" being bad. If you attack me with a giant trampler, and I block with everything and have a creature with Banding, then I control where your trampler's damage goes, and I can put all of your damage in to a 1/1 and have no damage trample over. I use it all the time.
There's a card coming out in Bloomburrow that's basically an upgraded version of Afterlife.
In no universe was WotC worried about being sued over gambling. It's not gambling in the legal sense.
Gambling is when a person bets or risks something of value (like money) based on a chance outcome that is out of their control or influence with the understanding that they will either gain increased value or lose their original value determined by the specific outcome.
I'm sure given this definition, I don't have to explain why ante doesn't fit the bill. At the end of the day, weather it feels like it or not sometimes, MTG is a skill and strategic game, where player input is vital and necessary. Now, it definitely had a slightly sus look to it, but WotC has never been shy in saying their mtg products, especially in early magic, were geared to a teen audience, not kids. I think it was due to the bad PR, but they were never ganna be sued over that.
Different countries have different laws.