Next TCG Banlist Discussion

[King]

I understand the situation for Stratos keeping banned, but what are the conditions for Stratos unban in TCG ? What OCG Has that TCG can't have.

[Dread Kaiser]

My feeling on the matter in terms of a counter is that you kind of have to look at it individually. We have cards that blow up backrow, and we have monsters that search. Both effects are already present and theres several ways a deck could counter his effect. all the other cards are at 3, why can't this one be at 1.

However for something like towers, you don't have a lot of cards that offer immunity and there isn't a ton you can do to stop this guy. Yeah, utopia the lightning is going to be real common, but thats just 1 out, where as something like stratos has at least 5 going for the metagame alone that can and are run in all decks.

you say that, but keep in mind Stratos can blow up backrow AND search, and can be looped very easily. yes both effects are present, now how many are around in 1 card that can be searched by....lessee, 1 ROTA, 3 ECall, 2 Monk, 3 AHL, and 3 Shadowmist. so Searched by 12 cards. Want to take a guess at how many of those will be gone to bring back Stratos? or how many Dank laws I will see in a given hour of YGOpro....

The "Just MST it" Argument, as I like to call it, is of course completely stupid and only an idiot completely unfamiliar with the game would use it seriously and I'd recommend they take a statistics class before they come back to YGO, so I hope you are not actually using that

sad thing is we have had too damn many people use this argument, thankfully none seem to be active anymore, but I digress.

there is no real "out" to stratos any more than the is an out to say Card of Demise or Raigeki, its not something that sits on the field and waits for you to Toolbox it so comparing it to towers is kinda pointless. your "out" to it ammounts to "have 2-3 Strikes facedown" and yes, you will want 2-3, like I said it can be looped easily

This really isn't a matter of "it will make HERO's tier 1/0" or anything like that, its just a matter of not hitting balanced cards to have a problem card come home. and Without Super poly it would just be another R4NK with Dank spam deck anyway, just MAYBE featuring Divine Wind

[Dread Kaiser]

I understand the situation for Stratos keeping banned, but what are the conditions for Stratos unban in TCG ? What OCG Has that TCG can't have.

Banning and/or Limiting basically every other HERO Searcher and denying any chance of ROTA coming down for starters. A lot of people don't seem to understand exactly how much searching power Stratos brings to the table

Why the OCG has it still is mostly just due to difference in standards, TCG has a much lower bar as to what counts as broken or over-centeralized (for example, Shock Lock. the TCG got rid of that thing long before the OCG finally realized it decided games by just existing) the OCG also already has E Call and AHL @3 with Shadowmist, monk and ROTA at 1 so they don't have that "don't hit balanced cards to bring back Problem card" issue to begin with, which is the main point against Stratos here in the TCG

[Zarkiel]

you say that, but keep in mind Stratos can blow up backrow AND search, and can be looped very easily. yes both effects are present, now how many are around in 1 card that can be searched by....lessee, 1 ROTA, 3 ECall, 2 Monk, 3 AHL, and 3 Shadowmist. so Searched by 12 cards. Want to take a guess at how many of those will be gone to bring back Stratos? or how many Dank laws I will see in a given hour of YGOpro....

The "Just MST it" Argument, as I like to call it, is of course completely stupid and only an idiot completely unfamiliar with the game would use it seriously and I'd recommend they take a statistics class before they come back to YGO, so I hope you are not actually using that

sad thing is we have had too damn many people use this argument, thankfully none seem to be active anymore, but I digress.

there is no real "out" to stratos any more than the is an out to say Card of Demise or Raigeki, its not something that sits on the field and waits for you to Toolbox it so comparing it to towers is kinda pointless. your "out" to it ammounts to "have 2-3 Strikes facedown" and yes, you will want 2-3, like I said it can be looped easily

This really isn't a matter of "it will make HERO's tier 1/0" or anything like that, its just a matter of not hitting balanced cards to have a problem card come home. and Without Super poly it would just be another R4NK with Dank spam deck anyway, just MAYBE featuring Divine Wind

I would rather have stratos that lets me play other fusions and do different things than a shit ton of searchers. the only other cards that would go to one would be hero cards since rota's already at 1 because its too generic of a search card. But of course I'm an idiot whose been completely unfamiliar with the game since the beginning and my ideas are trash.

[Never die]

Its not THAT different though. What is meta over there eventually becomes meta over here for the most part. The only real difference is how they build their decks.

Yeah because tcg and ocg exclusive cards/decks do not matter or when/at what point tcg/ocg gets the cards(when star seraph was released ocg they had soul charge and shock master at 3 while when tcg got seraphs they were mostly outdated and tcg had soul charge at 1 and shock master banned for example).

On top of the banlists which in both sides people favor some cards more(ocg liked shock master so much it took them till recently to ban it and tcg disliked gladiator beasts so much it took years till we got their best member back at 3)not to mention both banlists let cards off that help to promote their recents packs and set.

But 'sure' the only thing that matters is that they build the decks differently.

[Dread Kaiser]

Yeah because tcg and ocg exclusive cards/decks do not matter or when/at what point tcg/ocg gets the cards(when star seraph was released ocg they had soul charge and shock master at 3 while when tcg got seraphs they were mostly outdated and tcg had soul charge at 1 and shock master banned for example).

On top of the banlists which in both sides people favor some cards more(ocg liked shock master so much it took them till recently to ban it and tcg disliked gladiator beasts so much it took years till we got their best member back at 3)not to mention both banlists let cards off that help to promote their recents packs and set.

But 'sure' the only thing that matters is that they build the decks differently.

little heavy on the sarcasm there.....

[iNfiniTe Se7eNz]

the OCG is a VERY different game. OCG has HFD at 1, Releaser and Super Rejuv at 3 and I don't hear anyone begging to get those back.

I know for a fact I'm not the only one who has been begging for Harpie's Feather Duster. I'd trade Raigeki for it. And I guess we could knock Dark Hole back down to one.

[Zarkiel]

Yeah because tcg and ocg exclusive cards/decks do not matter or when/at what point tcg/ocg gets the cards(when star seraph was released ocg they had soul charge and shock master at 3 while when tcg got seraphs they were mostly outdated and tcg had soul charge at 1 and shock master banned for example).

On top of the banlists which in both sides people favor some cards more(ocg liked shock master so much it took them till recently to ban it and tcg disliked gladiator beasts so much it took years till we got their best member back at 3)not to mention both banlists let cards off that help to promote their recents packs and set.

But 'sure' the only thing that matters is that they build the decks differently.

But when seraphs came out in tcg, they were still being used. The only reason the metas are different is time release and, within the last two years, ban list differences. But decks that are meta in the ocg become meta in the tcg. If the lists were the same, we'd be running pretty much the same thing as them, especially since ygopro is a pretty common thing in the community now.

But since the ban lists are different, there's deck building differences.

[Baroque]

My feeling on the matter in terms of a counter is that you kind of have to look at it individually. We have cards that blow up backrow, and we have monsters that search. Both effects are already present and theres several ways a deck could counter his effect. all the other cards are at 3, why can't this one be at 1.

Most other things that blow up backrow or search are, in one way or another, limited in their applications (such as by circumstance [e.g., Ketos requires you to Tribute him to pop backrow] or by mechanics [e.g., Deneb's OPT clause]), and rarely do they ever pack both into one card, let alone without concrete limitations -- after all, it's criminally easy to Summon a guy like Stratos often, sometimes multiple times in one turn. Moreover, you say that there are 'several ways a deck could counter his effect', but that logic runs on the assumptions that a deck will have these 'ways' available and applicable at the time that Stratos is being used, that they will not be expended before Stratos is, that there won't be other things that they might be needed for, and so on and so forth. The longer the 'A Counter Exists, Therefore' argument is put under a magnifying glass, the greater the chance of it catching fire like an ant on a sidewalk.

It is easy to say in a vacuum that 'there are counters', but that is only because there are counters to everything. Again, that a counter exists is terrible reasoning for a card's removal from the banlist; we need only look (again, given that I already mentioned it once) to the classic case of Snatch Steal's temporary unbanning to see a solid example of why this is so.

On paper, there's a ton of counters for it, many of which are also popularly run -- it folds to backrow hate (including popular Quick-Plays MST and Twin Twisters), does naught to targetproofed or effectproof monsters (an increasingly common demographic), and as always can be hit with your typical negation cards. In practice, as we can tell by how quickly it jumped back onto the list after it'd been set to Limited, these mattered about as much as the price of bread does to a whale shark.

Whenever you look at a card on the banlist, it should never cross your mind that 'a counter exists, so maybe it could come off now' -- it never matters in the long run, for reasons already stated. It's how cards interact with one another in general that you should look at, not just 'this can trump this'. Does Stratos generate too much advantage too easily? Does Stratos fit into any particularly ridiculous(ly effective) strategies? Have we seen anything out of it in the past that might still be applicable (or at least, might become applicable again) if he were to come off the list? These questions and others like them (there's plenty of permutations you could apply) have much more weight, hold much more water, in situations like these.

I won't deny that Stratos could at least potentially try to get off the banlist in the way that cards like Snatch Steal and Thousand-Eyes Restrict did (among others), even if I doubt it would stay off it for very long (the TCG's love of it would see to that), but I just can't stand the "A Counter Exists, Therefore" argument being used to justify such a thing occurring.