Ban all blue counter cards
All blue counter cards should be banned. They make this game pathetically unfun. I know, let's play a card game where we don't play any cards. How great. All you d-bag's that play blue counter decks can suck it. Blue decks are the worst thing in this game and should be taken away completely and replaced with something much more fun.
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Longhair#84059 commented
Back in the late 90's, I built a mono blue control deck that beat my friend playing a world champion deck he had purchased. Not saying that I may not have had an amazing draw or that he may have played a complex deck incorrectly, but as a newer player at the time I was proud of that. Shortly thereafter, we all stopped playing denial because it just bores anyone playing against it. Playing my blue denial deck even bored me quite a bit. Having the occasional counterspell is great for the game just as spot removal is. When the entire deck concept is to not allow your opponent to play, it sucks. It goes the same for hand destruction, one sided board wipe and cards that completely shut down an archetype. The construct I despise most is the instant win card. An aggro deck will outpace a counter deck. A counter deck will shut down a combo deck. It keeps going like rock, paper, scissors. Only a counter spell will stop an instant win card. Unfortunately, they are usually played in the same deck. For standard, WOTC would just need to monitor how many counters are produced per set (good luck). Every other format is just eternally screwed.
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PressureChamber#23947 commented
Counterspells have been with blue forever and have been integral in playing blue in general. It's part of the theme of blue (WotC has been violating color themes recently which is another problem with the current sets). If counterspells are gone, then you might as well not even print blue. Other colors already have plenty of draw cards so why even play blue at all? Of all the cards that should be banned, counterspells generally are not one of them. There are worse offenders that really need bans like Hearthfire Hero or one of those other excessively cheap cards that grow huge fast.
One of the problems with MTG standard today is just the surplus of cards that do all the same thing and the amount of sets in standard is excessive. Consider the current form of Standard compared to Standard in the past. In the past it used to be that there was two blocks and one core set much like how "Alchemy" is done today. The closest thing the current "standard" resembles is the old extended which really wasn't very popular.
At the end of a block's life in standard there would be an additional core set, then the older block and older core set was cycled out. Then you would get a new standard with the first set of the new block, the newest core set, and the block that remained from the previous standard. Each block having three sets, standard would have 5 sets for the first "quarter," 6 for the second "quarter," 7 for the third "quarter," as the newer block's sets were added. Then 8 for the final quarter before the older block was cycled out yet again and a new block reintroduced.
Whereas with the new version of standard, the three sets per block has been abandoned and the convention changed. Now we have three blocks in standard, no core set. But each block has more than three sets, about 5 each except the newest. This is a total of 11 sets in the block. That is much more cards potentially than any standard has previous, especially counter spells. Since every set has some sort of counter spell that's at least as much as a dozen possible counter spells. Whereas looking at an older standard block, the Mirrodin/Kamigawa block, there are only 7 in Mirrodin, 9 in Kamigawa, 4 in eighth edition, and 3 in ninth edition. At the height of the block, there were 23 counterspells. Most of them were specific. The block rotation to Ravnica removing the Mirrodin block and eighth edition counterspells for its counterspells--about 11 in total for about 5 in total for Ravnica. Most of them were expensive to play and in a best-of-three, you'd just cycle in your sideboard to deal with that deck.
Whereas now after a block rotated out for the bloomburrow block we have 11 total sets in standard. The result is an excess of cards, the design of which have undergone extreme power creep since the days of Mirrodin. As a result, even after a block rotation, there are 25 spells that counter a spell of some type. A number of counterspells in the past you would be lucky to see printed at the peak of a block at the beginning of a block.
In tournament setting however, counterspell decks tend to not win as if they don't get removal they tend to loose to the more consistent faster decks.
Counterspell decks really only gives a hard time to high cost decks. A solution would be to work on your deck's tempo as to increase its playing speed or to play some way to counter counter spells like playing hand control, deck control, etc. One thing to also try is to run some morph lands or some of the spawn creature lands so that you can always have a win condition while your opponent sits there doing nothing with counterspells in their hand.
The final problem is that random games allow pretty much any deck. Whereas for random games that are not subject to best of three and do not allow sideboards should work by different rules. There was an older app on steam, I think something like "Magic Duels" or something else like that, which only allowed a limited amount of certain cards. So you couldn't run four of certain cards. You could only run two. Also, the cardpool wasn't as large.
My opinion on this matter is that you should stop playing standard and play alchemy instead. There is still the occasional person playing a four turn red deck (Why even play MTG if you're going to run that deck? there's practically no match!) but it's a little better than what you see in standard.
What needs to be done general is to consistently reduce the power of cards in general in the future.
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failnation#65496 commented
Garbage players play garbage spells.
Unfortunately Wizbro doesn't like fixing problems. -
Stevo#49494 commented
I just lost to a guy that played 1 creature spell and then just counter spelled everything i tried to play. I also think that counterspells are the worst mechanic of mtg and would love to see them gone, but at the very least make every counter cost at least 4 or 5 mana. I’m so sick of 1-2 counters like mana scatter, negate, an offer you can’t refuse, etc.