Has anyone played the Historical AA Basically no Bans yet? I was excited to try it but all of my decks were Channel decks (lol) and with Channel being banned, I'm not super interested anymore. I don't know why they banned anything tbh, I think the format stabilizes with everything playable.
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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I haven't played it, I'm not really a Historic player at all. Might try to do a game or two just for the 1k XP, we'll see.
I have to admit I don't understand the logic behind the "basically". If you ban three cards to make the format balanced, and it works, why isn't Historic just like that all the time? Conversely, if it doesn't work, then how is this unbalanced format any better than the unbalanced format where those three cards are playable?
Yea you've correctly identified the paradox in Historic. I think they kind of screwed up with Alchemy being forced in. They should have made a "Historic Alchemy" as a separate format. Historic would be amazing as a vintage style format where these cards were all legal. I personally thought it was fine but perhaps they have data on the game play and it could have shown cards like Channel were played in too high a %. Release the data!
They did explain their reasoning behind it. It's an all access event anyway. You can play whatever you want.
Oh cool I missed that. It definitely explains things but honestly a few points:
The top 20 cards showed up in 20% of all games played during the event.
That doesn't seem high enough to me. Channel and Demonic Tutor were played a lot because no one has been able to play with them before. They never posted what the actual single stats were for Channel or Demonic Tutor but even if those hit 1 in 5 games, that doesn't even seem that high at all to me. Certainly not to at least see what happens in round 2 of the event.
It's an absurdly powerful effect that's banned in almost every format. To me it makes sense. I also think the stats were a bit skewed because the meta shifted from being channel decksto being channel decks vs anti channel decks to other decks. I know there were way more channel decks at the start of the event than at the end.