From: JonPKibble@aol.com
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 1999 8:41 PM
To: dep6@ix.netcom.com
Subject: Magic and Shakespeare

To Ban Or Not To Ban, That Is The Question...

... that is the question that many Magic players are battling over on the Dojo
these days. The answer is, of course, to ban. Why? Allow me to briefly analyze
the pros and cons.

The Con:
- Cards you have traded for are now not worth as much

The Pros:
- Turn three kills are not something intended for Magic.
- Cards can be traded for use in other formats, or redeemed for packs

Would you rather hold onto a card worth $10 and have it keep its value, while
dying to third turn solitaire kills all the time? Or would you rather play a
thought out game of Magic the way it was meant to be, and perhaps once was
long time ago. Interaction, folks, interaction. Instead of a combo race, it's
interaction which is vital to the game's success. If you trade your soul for a
turn 3 combo deck and it gets banned, well, you deserve it. I myself never
made spiral blue. Instead I played a deck with 16 counters to beat it. I
played six combo decks out of the eight rounds at a JSS qualifier, and guess
what? I won five of those rounds. I guess that means that you don't need to
play a 3 turn kill deck to beat one. (Look for JSS Corpse Dance in tourney
reports.) With Memory Jar, a deck with 16 counters still wins too much too
quickly, though, so banning is the right thing to do. Spiral Blue and
Earthcraft decks are sick. Recurring Whale was pretty mean too. And the deck I
played, corpse dance/altar/drake with 16 counters, was pretty nasty, too. I'm
glad that the DCI is reducing these combos to a minimum as best as they can. I
like the idea of banning cards more often, perhaps every 2 months would even
be great if not every month. That way people would have to rethink their
strategies more often without having to buy new product.

Jon Prywes
http://members.aol.com/jonpkibble