At this point Wizards' obsession with Temur Tower and ludicrously pretending its a pillar of the format in every article is just kind of sad and pathetic.
Today's article is by Quinn Murphy, he's not a WotC employee and he's writing from the perspective of trying to brew into a seemingly solved format, don't lump him in with the actual R&D people trying to put on a brave face.
For the people who are on staff, they have every incentive even without their bosses explicitly ordering them to present the rosy picture. If it turns out Standard is needs bans, they can
mea culpa later on; if it turns out it doesn't then they really don't want to have suggested it did and then "go back" on that.
I'm going to be blunt here: I think the move to try and remove any "unfun" gameplay in Standard has been a huge mistake.
I don't think the concept is bad, I think their model of what's unfun is bad. This concept originated 15 years ago or whatever with the realization that absolute lockdown and denial strategies (ponza, mono-discard, draw-go control, prison, etc.) are miserable, but the specific reason for that isn't purely that they "don't let you play the game" -- it's that by specifically stopping you from resolving anything, they limit what forms of interplay are possible, thereby reducing the strategic options to oppose them and pushing sideboard cards into a really narrow mold.
The problem is when they apply the same philosophy to partial lockdown strategies (tempo-control, incidental mana denial, board control, etc.) These types of decks all have multiple points of interaction and a wide range of potential counter-strategies, which makes them positive contributors to a metagame. These are the kinds of decks that better graveyard hate, PW hate, spot removal, etc. will enable and what's missing from current metagames.
They're just highlighting how tonedeaf they truly are with releases like these. People want answers. I don't mean to questions -- I mean to strategies.
They really need to get someone eloquent and outgoing to talk development the way Mark does design -- Forsythe used to do this before he was the boss, and no one's really filled the void since. Rosewater's always going to sound tone-deaf on this stuff because he
is tone-deaf, he doesn't and never will know competitive well enough to give smart answers about it and it's not actually his job to.
I think 5cc board wipes are fine. A format full of Chimeric Idols and Gideon is not.
Putting it this way makes me realize how much of the specific problem we have is that Standard is chock full of cards that are mostly one of three other permanent types (land, artifact, planeswalker) that only become a creature when it's time for combat.
In general this is a good mechanic because it diversifies what kind of cards people use for creatures and enables decks that are less all-in on creatures, but the combination of volume (there's
tons of these effects, way more than usual), quality (the best cards in these categories are consistently too good), and lack of targeted answers makes it oppressive here.
I'm wondering now if you can design a removal regimen that actually addresses this, and the similar issues that artifacts and PWs regularly have on competitive formats. Maybe part of the answer is just leaning in much harder on multi-type removal so it's easier for people to justify running it -- stuff like Naturalize, Hero's Downfall, etc. has been really helpful in previous environments in letting people deal with threats from multiple different types of decks.
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