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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Art Waring" data-source="post: 9433753" data-attributes="member: 7037141">Yeah I hear you man. The rotation of sets was crucial, as was a comprehensive knowledge (or as you say institutional knowledge) of how the game works as a product and as a competitive format.I know you point out that Companion cards were a terrible design choice, and I agree, but I think it also bears mentioning that they have not learned from those mistakes like they have in the past.Banning cards is now somehow taboo. Both Wotc & the EDH Rules Committee (known as the RC) have not made significant bannings to EDH in years. I suspect that they are no longer able to make rulings without the approval of wotc. The RC's policy is essentially to "Rule 0" everything, which is handwaving any responsibility for the format onto players (many of which play at LGS' where Rule 0 does not work out well).For example, the most recent card under the lens for banning is Nadu, but everyone knows that they won't ban Nadu in modern because that would mean they would have to admit to making a mistake in design, so instead they will ban the card that combo's with Nadu (that would be the equipment card <a href="https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74415" target="_blank">Shuko</a>). When Shuko gets banned, and it likely will instead of the offending card Nadu, and then the Nadu player will just take the Shuko's out of their deck and replace the with Lightning Greaves. The deck still gets its combo piece, and nothing has changed at all. They get to pretend they addressed the problem in modern, when in time they will then have to ban the greaves and so on...EDH is much worse, because not only are the RC never going to ban Nadu, they aren't even going to be welcome to the discussion of banning anything. They are essentially a self-selected group of people with their hands perpetually tied by their close connection to Wizards. At the moment I think that they do contribute as consultants on EDH cards, but if that is the case then they are not doing their job very well (as they maintain that they are trying to keep EDH a healthy format, but can't stop the release of format warping cards).The most obvious example of this is cEDH (competitive EDH) as a growing format. The RC doesn't want to acknowledge the existence of cEDH because they don't want to split up the format, but they also can't decide what is casual and what isn't (just Rule-0 it!). In game stores, everyones deck is a 7 in terms of power level (from 1 to 10), and that means absolutely nothing because nobody is on the same page about what constitutes a power 7 deck and a power 8 deck. Thus leads to differing expectations at the game table, and can lead to less fun at the table.</blockquote>

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