The recent bannings of Birthing Pod, Dig Through Time, and Treasure Cruise have upended the magic world. There are lots of opinions and while people debate the validity of the bans, the method of WotC's bans is definitely becoming much different than it has been in the past.
The specific bans that we just got for modern seem fairly legitimate. Treasure Cruise was totally busted and Dig Through Time and Birthing Pod had the ability to piece together combo decks. Pod has had a really solid run throughout Modern's existence. I don't think there's a deck with a better pedigree. LSV, arguably Pod's best player, agreed that Pod has had it coming. My argument is not with these cards but rather the way that the banned list is being used to shape Modern.
Its come up many times how ridiculous the Modern banned list is, but to understand it we have to look into the goals that Wizards has for the format. Aaron Forsythe talked about the order they want new players to get into the various formats of Magic. It went Duels of the Planeswalkers > Sealed > Draft > Standard > Modern > Legacy. Vintage basically doesn't exist in paper form in any meaningful way. We can see that they have Modern somewhere between Legacy and Standard. Legacy and Standard are completely different formats, and trying to find a middle ground is difficult. Modern was created with the best of intentions, but it has several challenges that WotC did not anticipate. Specifically, having a large non-rotating format lends itself to stagnation for long periods of time. Legacy is a great example. You would think with such a huge number of available cards that people would be innovating whole new archetypes all the time. That just doesn't happen, even with there being something worth winning, Legacy doesn't turn over constantly. People establish solid decks and attempt to master them rather than constantly shifting around. There are new archetypes that show up in Legacy or radical reinventions of existing decks, but that isn't the norm. Standard, more than any other format, rewards experimentation and innovation. You have much smaller card pools, so finding something that attacks the status quo is more meaningful, and easier since Standard gets a significant number of new cards with each set that's printed. The same number of cards is almost meaningless in Eternal formats since so many of them can't compete with the best of the best.
That is the essential problem with Modern. Modern is an Eternal format. Its card pool doesn't reach back all the way to the game's start, but it doesn't rotate. Established decks are much easier to pick up and master rather than to constantly be on the look out for the "next thing." Innovation is certainly possible but many options are going to be crowded out by their superior cousins. Modern is much closer to Legacy than it is to Standard, except there is no Force of Will to hold the combo decks down. This means that WotC has had to take a much larger hand in the format than it has in formats in the past.
They have stated that they don't want combo to be consistently faster than turn four. They also have stated that they want to promote diversity. Their bans have become less about stopping mistakes like Skullclamp from running wild and more about trying to shape the format into a version that is more like Standard. They want to encourage diversity to the point where they are banning cards to disable decks. They did the same thing with Deathrite Shaman and Bloodbraid Elf. There are cards that they have never allowed to be legal like Jace the Mind Sculptor or Ancestral Visions. They are over banning cards to try to promote diversity rather than unbanning cards that would be great checks on the format. Even from the cards above Deathrite Shaman would have been an outstanding unban in the face of Delve and Pod. Both of those strategies rely on the Graveyard, but its like they are so afraid of admitting that any card that goes on the banned list was a mistake to put there that they can't take it off. They have to make up their minds. Either the banned list is a living document where cards come off and on based on the needs of the format, or the cards placed on the list are mistakes that only get banned under the direst of circumstances.
Using the banned list for Modern the way they are also undermines people's desire to commit to the format. Birthing Pod in particular feels pretty egregious for this reason. Pod has been near the top of the Modern food chain for a long time. Years in fact. Its won the most tournaments and a copy of it is almost always in the top eight. Banning it now, when so many people have committed their limited Magic budgets to playing it just feels like a slap in the face. It might have been a necessity, I don't have as much information as they do, but the fact that they are banning cards so frequently in Modern is testing people's patience. It would be like practicing Ryu for a Street Fighter tournament. Pouring your 4-6 hours a week that you have free, learning him and his match ups, and then a month or so out from the event that you've been practicing for Capcom says that Ryu is too ubiquitous and can't be played in tournaments anymore. You might just quit playing Street Fighter altogether than invest another 40-50 hours into learning another character. Take into account that Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time were only legal for three months, a pittance of time in Eternal Formats, and people's anger over the bannings become even more understandable.
The question is, why are they going through so many hoops to try and promote diversity? I think the answer is because of the increase in the importance of coverage. Wizards has realized that the Pro Tour and Grand Prix coverage is great advertising in addition to the pinnacle of play. If the coverage is just going to be the same three decks for the Pro Tour they feel the need to take action. It should be noted that this philosophy basically only applies to Modern as the influx of new cards has a good chance of shaking up Standard. The issue here is that you aren't letting people figure things out for themselves. Non-rotating formats are great at rewarding deep knowledge of a singe deck and maneuvering specific card choices to beat what you are expecting. Three months is not enough time for those formats to have explored their large card pool for answers. The most recent Top 8 of a Modern Event had tons of different decks. People landed on a decent sideboard option to combat Treasure Cruise decks. It was a bonkers card and it might have needed banning in the end, but more time with it would have been worthwhile.
More problematic is the banning of Treasure Cruise in Legacy and its restriction in Vintage. This feels like they just wanted to end the debate about the card. The blurb in the ban announcement was barely two sentences on Treasure Cruise in Legacy and Vintage. Its essentially splash damage from the banning in Modern. Three months was barely enough to justify the banning in Modern, and nowhere close to long enough to make a correct decision for the true Eternal formats. The meta-game just doesn't move fast enough to make that kind of judgement. If talking about the magic online meta-game, than of course U/R Delver is going to swamp the queues, its super cheap to build compared to other options and it has a good game plan. It showed up in SCG opens for the same reasons but it didn't feel like it was dominating those tournaments either. Treasure Cruise was the first real shake up Vintage had seen in years, and it drove a lot of interest in Legacy. Maybe it was too good, but it certainly hadn't been through the ringer it needed to go through for a format with 20 years of history behind it.
I suppose the point I'm making is that it seems like Wizards of the Coast have stopped asking "How good is too good?" in relation to the ban list and have begun asking "How popular is too popular?" This sounds basically the same but there is a pretty big gulf between the two. How good something is not a question of how much of the field it makes up but how much a given deck wins based on how many people show up with it. Treasure Cruise and Birthing Pod had good win percentages but the larger problem was how much of the field was playing those decks. The were ubiquitous, and its that more than anything that got them axed. Large non-rotating formats are going to have ubiquitous decks though. People want to play something that they know will do well and not invest their money on an experimental deck. Without the threat of rotation the format will have moments of stagnation. Rather than letting the player base push through this issue on their own, WotC feels the need to shake the format up artificially through bans. This method, while effective, is going to cause rising feelings of frustration and uncertainty from players that are afraid of pricing themselves into a format that is almost guaranteed to have its best decks banned out to promote diversity in the name of a more exciting tournament to watch.
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