« Cut to the chase | Main | In search of the Death Cloud »

Goodbye, Top

The September 1, 2008 Banned and Restricted List announcement is up. Here are the changes:

Extended

Sensei's Divining Top is banned

Legacy

Time Vault is banned

Vintage

Time Vault is restricted
Chrome Mox, Dream Halls, Mox Diamond, Personal Tutor, and Time Spiral are no longer restricted

I don't have much of an opinion about the eternal formats, but there's already some discussion and dismay about the banning of Top in Extended. The explanation will come later on this week in the upcoming Latest Developments column, but if I had to guess, I'd think it would be a time issue. Decks that run Top benefit from using it every turn, and each activation adds time -- sometimes, a lot of time -- to each turn. Over the course of a match, and then over the course of an entire tournament, that's a ton of extra time. Extra time means more matches going to time, more draws, and a general train wreck for most tournaments.

That's my guess, at any rate -- not power level issues, but time.

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on September 01, 2008 03:07 PM.

The previous post in this blog was Cut to the chase.

The next post in this blog is In search of the Death Cloud.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.