Thoughts on the March 1, 2012 Forbidden/Limited List – Part 2

Thoughts on the March 1, 2012 Forbidden/Limited List – Part 2









Yesterday we talked about some of the changes to the March 1, 2012
Forbidden & Limited Cards List. Equally important to changes are
things that didn’t change. Here are a few cards we talked about
changing, but haven’t taken action on at this time.

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Gladiator Beast Bestiari

Poor Bestiari has sat on the Limited List for a long time. Not
because of what he does, but because he’s a component of Gladiator Beast
Gyzarus. We’d like to give Gladiator Beasts a boost at the tournament
level. But de-limiting Bestiari doesn’t give Gladiator Beasts a boost.
It just gives the Gyzarus spam deck a boost. Which isn’t what we want to
do. So we’re still pondering this conundrum.

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Book of Moon

This card has had its ups and downs on the F&L List. It has also
fallen in and out of popularity. When it has a streak of popularity, it
quickly hits a point where everybody feels they HAVE to play with it.
There’s some evidence that Book is on the decline at the moment, but
every time we ease up on Book, it tends to pop up again like some crazy
game of whack-a-mole. So we’re going to play it safe and leave it where
it is, for now.

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Wind-Up Hunter

With cards from Order of Chaos, it’s possible to build a
powerful hand discard engine. And when the March 1 F&L list was
under discussion, we considered taking some preemptive action against
Wind-Ups. But the deciding factor was that, at the time, the deck had
been available in Asia for a while already, and they just weren’t
winning tournaments there.

We saw a lot of parallels between Wind-Ups and Lightsworn (see
yesterday’s comments on Lumina, Lightsworn Summoner). A Wind-Up deck can
be very nasty to face against in a tournament. But at the end of the
day, when we were looking at the situation at the start of the year,
they just didn’t seem to be winning in Asia. Tournament results in the
Americas and Europe since the release of Order of Chaos have
supported this: Wind-Ups are there, but not in heavy numbers, and
they’re not performing that well. We’ll continue to keep an eye on them,
though.

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Rescue Rabbit

We knew from the get-go that this would be a popular card, and it
bears watching because of its resemblance to the more open-ended Rescue
Cat (which is still forbidden). We’re keeping a very close eye on the
bunny. Will decks focused around this card end up crowding out all the
other decks? Time will tell. Inzektors are in a similar boat – a popular
deck with promise, that bears close watching. Although Inzektors
haven’t had their break-out moment, yet.

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These are some of the noteworthy examples. We usually touch on dozens
of cards during F&L discussion – sometimes briefly, sometimes with
long debate.
And often ask about cards currently on the list “does this still need
to be here?” which does result in changes – such as Torrential Tribute
& Call of the Haunted this last time around.

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Check back on Monday when I’ll talk about some invisible factors in
F&L list formulation, which aren’t apparent to the average observer!