[Partial Rollback] Removal

About two years ago, beatstick and rush decks were pretty much the entirety of the competitive metagame. The reason is pretty simple: CMC's monster versus monster combat, weak monster removal, and lack of useful high costing monsters combined to leave very few cost effective ways to deal with them. A slower deck's superior generation took far too long to translate into enough board strength to actually stop the bleeding, especially considering how many things could go horribly wrong during the game's setup.

Then Rudianos Unearthed came, and brought with it a plethora of solutions to the specific problem. A few of these solutions were actually straight up OP and quickly nerfed, but importantly, several cost effective 7 to 9 costing monsters were added. Also of particular note was the addition of one mulligan to the start of each game, which greatly improved the consistency of decks that intended to play monsters that large while providing little benefit to the rushes. The overall direction of balance changes in this period helped the slower decks, too.

This all had a remarkable side effect: ability and synergy monsters became playable. A deck could use large monsters to clear the way for ability monsters to stick, or in the absence of a 5-6 costing rush it could play the ability monsters first to generate some game winning advantage by the time the titans needed to clash. Playing a deck with a game plan more complicated than "1. get mana for a vanilla monster somehow 2. smash face" became not just the norm from a casual standpoint, but was truly the competitively superior choice.

7 months ago, a major game design change was made to CMC. Remember the "weak monster removal" mentioned earlier as a contributing factor to the supremacy of Golems and kin? This was changed, so that spells now generally trade with vanilla monsters at a 1 mana benefit rather than a 1 mana deficit. So the next "Fall" tournament (eventually) comes around, and this design change naturally leads to the first tournament in CMC history with little to no representation of vanilla rush---

Wait, no. That's not what happened. At all. Apart from a combo deck that won off the back of Remembrance (which is so good it's worth casting Recycling so you aren't limited to 4, and this is getting nerfed), and a netdeck that lost round 1, vanilla beats was at pretty much 100% representation. The variation was in how much each deck committed to the early game - did the deck pack buckets, or did it pack only generators? Either way, this is hardly the expected result. What gives?


Take a look at the new removal and ask, "What does this set of cards screw over the hardest?"

The answer, alarmingly consistently, is "the cards that had previously shut out the mid-costing beatsticks". Even when the removal isn't strong enough to kill the card outright, it can generally combine with a mid-costed beatstick or perhaps Rio or Drecker to make regaining tempo with large monsters a serious chore. Ability monsters have weak stats and just die, or take a hit in combat that they ordinarily survive and then get finished off. Synergy monsters get sniped off before reaching critical mass.

The mid costed beatsticks, on the other hand, don't really care. They are expendible; while getting a Winged Golem lasered is a bit of a loss, it's really not nearly as bad as losing the even larger monster that was going to restabilize the board for you. Mid costed beats don't need friends; when Spirit Bird's and Mystic Bird both hit the table, both of these need to be dealt with - they can't just laser the big one and wait a while with the other. All told, the safest answer to generic monster removal is, oddly enough, generic monsters. (...Or just not playing monsters at all, which is generally the hallmark of a noninteractive deck).

Dealing with opposing monsters is hard enough when packing anything that either isn't cost effective at straight up combat or doesn't come out the gates in a single turn of generation, but eventually there did emerge viable counterplay to deal with that. But counterplay is much harder to come by against and removal that is numbers-wise strong enough to be cost efficient even against vanilla light monsters. What can you even do for a deck that hinges on a monster that can die to a Orb of Fire? Can you really afford to sacrifice 3 or 4 of potential tempo to protect your Terminator Engine from a Laser?


As I see it, the upshot to all this is that removal needs to be scaled back from where it currently is. It is true that it was nearly unplayable before, but these spells took three steps forward when they needed only 1. In general, the speed increases (where they exist) should be undone altogether, as they serve to remove counterplay, while half of the numbers improvement should be rolled back.