[BCSWowbagger]

It turned out that there was a maximum length to a forum post (60,000 characters)! So I was been forced to continue my list in a new post. Here we go:

Senior Staff Meeting

Three months after winning Worlds with a deck that included Senior Staff Meeting, Franklin Kenter (MilesStuntDouble) put it on his "big list of problem cards" because it was (1) really powerful and (2) targeted by an existing card (Panel Overload).

There's always been agreement that, in the modern game, SSM is extremely powerful. It's not nearly as hard today to gather all five personnel types together as it was in AU. And it doesn't let you glance at a dilemma. It doesn't let you recover from a dilemma. It doesn't blunt a dilemma. It NULLIFIES a dilemma. At Interrupt speed! That... just doesn't happen in the modern game, not without some heavy expense and some very hit-and-miss effectiveness (e.g. The Genesis Effect, Only Logical).

Shape-Shift Inhibitor

This anti-downloader card was intensely disliked by a wide portion of the community. While developing the ban list, polls were posted internally and externally asking players what the "top 10 problem cards" in 1E were. Almost every single card included on anyone's list got banned or errata'd at some point. But when Rules Master Nick Fancher compiled the results, he discovered that SSI appeared on 7 lists, the leader by far. (Your Galaxy Is Impure was in second place with 4 lists.)

It probably helped that 1E's then-recently-resigned Director, Jeremy Commandeur, really hated SSI, and was often internally and externally discussing ways to fix it. Commandeur explained here:

Lets hop into the way back machine for a moment so I can tell you a story. I was a playtester for both 1E and 2E when Energize and All Good Things were being developed. The plan was to release Energize, the first expansion for 2E and then a few months later, release All Good Things as a boutique product to wrap up and finalize 1E. The playtest team I was working on focused almost all of our time on testing Energize as it was to be released first and we wanted to give 2E a shot of getting off the ground. When we finished testing Energize, and the set "locked" we turned our efforts to testing All Good Things. Many of the other playtest groups were not seriously testing All Good Things and were only playtesting 2E. We figured we had at least another month to get it right with AGT.

Decipher decided to print AGT and Energize at the same time to save money. Cost saving made since considering 1E was a "dead" game and that Decipher was in not so good shape and needed to save the bucks. However, this took our playtesting team off guard. From our perspective, AGT locked early and we never got to finish playtesting it.

We knew Shapeshift Inhibitor was a problem. Believe it or not, at the time we were also worried about Treacherous Advice as one of the guys on our team had devised a way to abuse it as part of a lock deck. Nobody on the team liked Shapshift Inhibitor that much, it felt rushed, incomplete and overbearing. We know why it was created, to contain DQ abuse where suddenly there 17 people in play on turn one. However, we were certain there had to be a better way to do it. We compiled a list of alternate variations for the gametext and were playing around with testing variations when the set locked and caught us all by surprise.

Ever since Shapeshift Inhibitor has felt like an incomplete card and somewhat of a personal failure. I felt I should have been testing AGT more aggressively while testing Energize and I should have spoked up about the problems with SSI earlier in the process. I was new at being a playtester and wasn't sure how exactly the process worked or how to contribute in such a way as to make progress and develop better cards.

Other cards in AGT feel rushed or incomplete. Strategema basically just bans cards and is the strongest wording on any ref card ever printed. It comes off as a bit of a cop out, a half-done effort to fix up 1E before the end. However, I don't think Strategema is truly bad for the game.

Fast forward to the present and Shape Shift Inhibitor is indeed bad for the game. It as much harm as good. Sure DQ mega-download decks are a problem and need to be counterbalanced, but in the process we made a card that makes many other legitimate, non-abusive cards unusable. Making so many good cards binder fodder is unacceptable. Playing Assign Mission Specialists, Assign Support Personnel, Dominion War Efforts, Sleeper Trap, Scout Encounter and others are nearly unusable because of SSI.

The community at large seems to agree that SSI is problematic. The Germans weakened it in their Balance of Power format. Although it doesn't say so on the Homebrew formats thread I found out when I arrived in San Diego that the SoCal guys had their own errata for SSI, changing it so that it allowed one download a turn. In the Virtual Sets I was developing with my local crew SSI was one of the first cards to get virtualized. We spent months playtesting variants of the card. You may have seen how we changed SSI in the Virtual 40 that was released publicly.

Things are always clearer in hindsight. The alterations we made to SSI in our Virtual 40 weakened it too much and people stopped using it altogether. Years of pent up SSI frustrations went to far and we gutted the card.

After a great deal of time and playtesting, I honestly believe SSI can be corrected with the addition of a single word. "Plays on table. Each player must first discard a personnel card in order to download an UNIQUE non-[Borg] personnel. (Immune to Kevin Uxebridge)" The addition of Unique contains DQ mass-downloads and forced Defend Homeworld decks without crippling Assign Support Personnel or Sleeper Trap.

[End Massive Rant]

I didn't play in this era, but the problem seems to have been that SSI was built to crush one kind of degenerate deck (Delta Quadrant mega-downloaders) but steamrolled too many others in the process. As Wambundu (always worth reading) later argued, SSI didn't even do a good job slowing down DQ.

To be clear, though: yes SSI was intensely hated by many... but it was also loved by many others. Well, not loved exactly, but lots of people were grateful for how it fixed a very broken part of the game.

So, if SSI was addressing such a broken part of the game, why hasn't SSI been errata'd in the eight years since?

Trick question: it has.

After years of discussion, brainstorming, and refinement, SSI's errata was released in The Next Generation. It's just that they decided to name it General Quarters. Dan Hamman explains:

One of my personal goals was to have an SSI-type thing out by the end of 2011. (I failed that one.) There came a point in the errata work for SSI that Design and Rules decided to just make a new card. The costing on SSI is bad, and we debated long an hard on what it should be. There were many ideas thrown about: an X-per-turn play limit, a scattering of affiliated cards that all slowed reporting and downloading differently, or just putting Shape-Shift Inhibitor back into the pool without changes.

The seed that germinated into the final card came out of testing, and was accompanied by this insight: Now everybody gets to use their favorite download card, but may only download once per turn. Downloads are now an opportunity cost, rather than a physical cost. Instead of cramming every last download possible into the first 1-2 turns of a game, now players will need to plan the 6-9 personnel downloads they will have the opportunity to use over the entire course of the game.

As some of you have reasoned out on the other thread, this means we can worry less about Defend Homeworld or download chains or any future cool downloads of key personnel (like Gowron or Duras or Kell or Wesley) because outside the seed phase, there is only so much you can do.

The decision to make this a Ref card was hard, and not made lightly. In fact, it was originally going to have some other method for implementing its text. However, cooler heads prevailed. I personally don't like leaning on the ref mechanic, but it exists for this function, so we decided to use the tools we have. We will re-assess this card and the effect it has on gameplay over the course of the summer. We have the benefit of flexibility, and you better believe we will act if this card does (or does not) do what it was designed for. -Dan

This was a controversial but clever compromise that split the difference between SSI's hardcore haters and hardcore fans. I think it's fair to say that this compromise has become accepted as a good choice for the game, but it is interesting to look back and remember just HOW much of a firestorm broke out in this community the day General Quarters came out.

Why not release General Quarters as the erratum for SSI, then? Here, Charlie Plaine explains:

We thought about making it the errata to SSI, but that still left the SSI/Berserk Changeling interaction too weird. It works much better on a new card. -crp

So, basically, Shape-Shift Inhibitor is banned today because its primary function (holding downloads in check) has been stolen by another card. SSI exists in a weird ban-list limbo entirely because of the strange interaction between itself and Berserk Changeling, which named it as a broken link but appeared to think SSI would be an Equipment rather than a plays-on-table Event.

If I were Errata today, I would have no clue how to address this weird tangle of issues.

Sherlock Holmes

Holmes has been on the ban list longer than there's been a ban list. He's one of a very small number of cards to get called out for a specific ban in X-List.

The reasons for the ban were summed up in a private forum in 2009, well before OTF design got underway:

He is very overused. There is no good reason not to play him. Even in the DQ.

If I can outplay you in getting cards out of my hand, I win. Fun for experienced players, but no fun for everybody else.

Plus, he is a draw engine you can't easily nullify. I can Kevin Kivas or Vision. I can come commandeer your Nor to shut down Process Ore. Sherlock can just sit at your HQ or outpost and be exceptionally hard to get rid off. You either have to not keep cards in hand, or give your opponent a big advantage.

He is also a draw engine with little/no cost. He has no upkeep, he costs one card play and then is permanent. You don't have to do anything to draw cards with him. No guys need to be present, you don't have to move ships or discard cards, you just get free draws forever.

Someone countered: "It is a great equalizer." Another person responded:

However, it is not actually an equalizer. You can free to play, spend, or otherwise discard those "equalizing cards" during your turn. In turn, the more cards you use, the more cards you draw. In effect, you are rewarded with drawing cards because you played more cards than your opponent. It's a rich get richer mechanic- which is a very bad idea. Further, most often, the worst case scenario with Sherlock Holmes is that the opponent will turn the game into "draw, go, one card in hand". Which is no worse than as though you didn't have Sherlock in the first place.

It went on the ban list and stayed there.

A month after that conversation, Holmes's situation got even worse. The release of Tribunal of Q led Jason Red to a nasty discovery:

Turn 1 - Download Sherlock Holmes. Give up my card draw to download and use Obelisk of Masaka - pitch my 7 cards, and convert all of the Masaka draws to downloads, filling up my play area with all the cards I could possibly need.

Turn 2 - Draw with Sherlock.

Sherlock's fate on the ban list was already sealed, but this made it even worse.

Interestingly, there was a general consensus on how to fix Sherlock:

Once each turn, if your opponent has more cards in hand, you may draw a card (two if Watson present)

I'm not sure what happened to that fix, but it appears to have simply fallen by the wayside -- I don't see records of it being tested or anything.

Smooth As An Android's Bottom

After the initial OTF banlist broke the back of the Holy Hexany, innovative deckbuilders managed to discover something that was -- briefly -- known as "New Hexany".

I say "briefly" because OTF's decisionmakers at the time acted quickly (as they tended to do). The first forum reports of New Hexany were in March 2011, but reports were scattered. The 1E Department spent the next month just trying to gather enough information to figure out how New Hexany actually worked.

Of course, it was Jeremy Commandeur who figured it out and demo'd it for The Powers That Be. Commanderu ran Smooth+Beyond The Subatomic at an April 2011 Regional. It was placed an internal watch list the very next day. Commandeur didn't post his deck until mid-May, which was just when the forum was starting to complain about New Hexany. Decision to ban Smooth and Beyond the Subatomic (which has since been errata'd) was made two weeks later. Ban released in the regular monthly update for July 2011.

Unclear to me whether it should still be banned, because I don't understand the combo. I will say that, internally, Smooth was considered the "lynchpin" of New Hexany, and decisionmakers were more on the fence about banning Beyond The Subatomic (but banned both to be certain New Hexany was dead before Worlds 2011).

FUN FACT: New Hexany was considered far more threatening in online games than other venues. This was because it relied on having a bunch of copies of cards from The Motion Pictures, which had become very expensive, in a time before universal printability.

Subspace Schism

MilesStuntDouble's list says this was banned for being countered by a card (Writ), which -- like many cards on the first-generation ban list -- was enough to make it presumed broken and bannable.

The official ban announcement states, "Subspace Schism – Discard decks just love this card. Opponents getting hit with multiple of these cards are not as happy."

The reality seems to have been more complicated than that, but only slightly. Despite being targeted by a card, it was passed over in the initial ban list, then added shortly after. It seems to have been missed in the initial ban list only as an oversight, since it was on the initial ban list sent to playtesting.

Schism was described internally as "plaguing" tournaments, it was one of the cards targeted by X-List, and it was one of the cards that had homebrew errata in the Revised Swedish homebrew format.

FWIW, they had a point. Last year, the Errata team considered Subspace Schism for parole -- that is, unbanning it with no changes -- alongside Black Hole. Black Hole survived playtesting and was re-released. Schism did not. Subspace Schism x32 was extremely frustrating for the victim (for reasons Wambundu has explained elsewhere), and probably was bad enough to keep Schism on the ban list... but Subspace Schism x19 + Heisenberg Compensators x13 + MEDICAL-drain dilemmas was absolutely fatal. The Schism user would simply nullify any drawn MEDICAL, then also nullify any drawn cards that might help break out of the Schism cycle.

(Thanks to everyone on the public forums who helped out with that. I didn't tell you that you were helping Playtesters find issues with Schism, but that's exactly what you did!)

Terraforming Station

Here's a surprise! The story has always been that T.S. was banned for being "unsuitable for tournament play," as Rulesmaster AllenGould put it once in 2010, soon after the ban list came out. And I'm sure that's a big part of it; T.S. is a really weird card.

But the official internal reason T.S. got banned was for being confusing -- I think the only card on the ban list there for that reason. Here's the conversation that got T.S. banned, on 16 January 2010, back when the ban list was being put together originally:

And I think that Terraforming Station should also be banned due to all the questions you get from that card. I know it's not played that often but Man do you have to argue with players about it!

Lets also ban Terraforming Station, just because it is so very difficult to track in a tournament setting.

Agreed. The card could do something far more useful

There was no further discussion of it, from Design or Rules or Testing, before the ban list was released several months later.

(For his part, I don't believe Allen was part of the ban list creation; he came on soon after and his post was based on his best understanding at the time.)

The Big Picture

OTF made this card into a rule (OTF Rule #7: Victory Conditions, Clause 2). If it's both a card and a rule, they can stack in an unbalanced way, so the card got the banhammer. Since The Big Picture will always be needed as-is in Open, it's never going to be errata'd and, I expect, is never coming off the ban list.

The Sheliak

MilesStuntDouble says it was banned for being targeted by a card (Temporal Vortex), and that appears to be the case. It appeared on MSD's first draft of a ban list (which was, indeed, mostly just "cards countered by cards"). This list was reposted internally a few times over the next couple of years (growing slightly in the process), and heavily informed the first draft of the OTF ban list. Sheliak never came off.

The 1E Department occasionally discussed the card in subsequent years. It could lock players out of needed missions, or destroy their only reporting location, and OTF frowns on that sort of thing (as did Decipher, by the end).

Time Travel Pod

TTP is an artifact (meaning it can only be accessed in the midgame) that removes a single ship from the game for 5 turns. When TTP was released, the game was something like 30 turns long, and you could count on getting TTP by maybe Turn 10. Losing a ship for 5 turns meant it was gone for about 15% of the game overall, or 25% of the remaining game.

By 2012, when it was banned, the game was something like 8-9 turns long, with missions solvable by Turn 3 or 4. TTP thus removed a ship for roughly 60% of the game, or 100% of the remaining game! Against a deck that merely had a big ship and a large crew, this stung badly. Against a deck that depends on a particular ship (e.g. Home Away From Home, Fed Flag Renewed), it was a game-killer.

Once Temporal Rift got banned (for similar reasons) and errata'd to be defensive-only, TTP got big as the "next-best" card.

Banning TTP was controversial. The CC believed, for a considerable time, that the meta would adjust to it, counters would proliferate, and that it would become less popular once Insurrection decks (all the rage at the time) became less popular. It was placed on an internal watch list -- deliberately not banned -- in November 2011. (Fun fact: almost nothing else on that watch list got banned, except Ceti Eel, which took seven years.)

But the darn thing kept winning events. In May 2012, the Rules Committee (responsible for the ban list at the time) considered three approaches:

1. Ban it for now, errata at some point.
2. Change the rules (Glossary/CRD) slightly so that can use STP to return-to-hand a TTP'd ship.
3. Change the OTF seeding rules to have seeds at "your missions" get placed before seeds at "opponent's missions" (but still keep self-seeds encountered last).

This argument is why #1 prevailed:

The original intention of the ban list was "isolate and contain" until a solution is devised. I am not a fan of changing rules to support a single card, so my advice is to BAN TTP and revisit when time and resources allow.

At almost the same time, a large public forum thread went up about TTP. The thread makes for good reading and contains much intelligent discussion of TTP (both pro and con). It's solid research fodder for anyone working on errata to it years later. But, after months of scrutiny, the fate of TTP was likely already sealed before the thread went up. It was banned in the next rules update, on 10 June 2012.

Tox Uthat

Nobody has a problem with Tox Utaht. Tox was banned in 2016 so that Supernova could be unbanned. Since you can't generally play Supernova without Tox Utaht, this boiled down to the same thing... except that Bashir Founder can now download Supernova without a Tox Utaht against large armadas.

So why was Supernova banned in the first place?

Well, it's an extremely powerful card. It erases a location when played -- all ships, facilities, dilemmas, points, cards played on location, everything. It can even hit homeworlds, unlike almost everything else in the game (including Ravenous Hunger).

On the other hand, Supernova's an extremely expensive card: you first need to earn Tox Utaht (an Artifact, thus not available until midgame), then you need to card play Tox Utaht as an event on a subsequent turn, then you need to card play Supernova on another subsequent turn.

This was apparently expensive enough for many years. Decipher never created a real counter (although Persistence of Memory may count). It was banned in X-List (which banned all Premiere verbs and artifacts), but was not included on the initial OTF ban list in 2010. For 2010 and half of 2011, Supernova was perfectly legal.

Then it was banned in July 2011. This is especially interesting, because (according to contemporary internal research) Supernova did not appear in any public deck lists during the 12 months leading up to its ban. What happened between 2010 and 2011?

In February 2011, the Rules Master received a report from a playgroup:

Hey Allen,

We just had a 1E Revised Format tourney here in [town], yesterday. (skill level/experience: me-16 years, [person 2]. - 3 prior/recent events, [player 3] - 1 prior event 15 months ago, and [player 4] - 1st ever 1E gig). [player 5] sat it out as he had other plans, but, lent his current nasty deck to [player 4] and explained how to play it.

To summarize, two Tox Uthats, and two Supernovas.
[player 4] destroyed all chance of either [P2] or [P3] even remotely having an opportunity to play the game by nuking each of their sole/prime/primary facility location. Why are these two despicable cards not on our Ban List?

I really believe they both should be. We're having a hard enough time getting more players to try 1E, and I thought that was the point of the ban list?

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

The Rules Committee discussed the issue and decided that no action should be taken without evidence of other metas being affected.

Over the next several months, that particular playgroup continued to ask the Rules Committee to ban Supernova and/or Tox Uthat, because their meta was being dominated by this combo and new players were being driven away. (I won't identify the playgroup, but suffice to say that their meta was fairly casual and isolated from high-level play.) Rules continued to resist this for several months, thinking that no card should be banned over a single playgroup (even if the card is wrecking that playgroup).

However, the decision was finally made that newbies (around the world) were too vulnerable to this particular card. They would go into games not knowing about it, not knowing about counters to it, and end up suffering a devastating NPE in one of their first 1E games. Supernova was added to the ban list in July 2011.

Rulesmaster Allen explained to the community in September 2011:

Supernova - I don't have the decklist handy, but we started getting reports of decks running double Tox, double Supernova. Wiping out a mission (and quite possibly your facilities) is a crazy powerful ability, and all the other methods of doing it have been banned already (Black Hole, Sheliak). You can argue that the cost of solving a mission is balance enough (and some days I'd agree with you), but it was decided to err on the side of caution.

(Allen was being generous; he was not a big fan of this ban.)

I went into this one expecting it to be very easy. Supernova is an extremely powerful card. I assumed it had been banned because somebody broke it and it took over the worldwide meta. That's how most cards get banned (like Time Travel Pod). But what I found instead was a card banned to essentially protect one isolated playgroup that was having trouble with modern pacing and counters, and a decision-making team divided about that choice.

I've tried to avoid giving direct opinions in most of these entries, but it now seems to me that Tox Utaht could come back with minimal changes to Supernova -- in light of Black Hole's successful reintroduction to the game, perhaps no changes at all. And I couldn't be more surprised about that.

What Does God Need With A Starship?

When all cards became printable, on 3 February 2014, WDGNWAS? was instantly at the top of everyone's watch list. This seemed like the quintessential case of a powerful card that had been held in check solely by the high rarity of cards from The Motion Pictures. It gives you a ship! At interrupt speed! Potentially more than once each turn! And it locks up your opponent otherwise! Whoa!

But, after about nine months of people trying to break WDGNWAS?, the community kinda gave up. It turned out to be fairly hard to use WDGNWAS? in high multiples. Kris Sonsteby (who wrote the linked post above) told me he'd cut it out of all his decks within three months of writing that post. Its high-water mark was having seven copies in Stefan Slaby's winning Worlds Day One deck in 2014, but the same deck finished third in Day Two, and the only other person to run WDGNWAS? at all was Kris Sonsteby (two copies; also, Jason Drake's deck notes show he teched against WDGNWAS?). Decklists show WDGNWAS? was popular but was not winning all that many tournaments, especially not at high levels. I saw this (and still see it today) as an impressive example of the meta absorbing and adapting to a powerful new(ish) card very well. WDGNWAS? settled into a niche, but never dominated.

In February 2015, one year after printability, it was banned anyway.

Why? Three reasons:

First, a "soft" decision to ban it had been made several months earlier, back in October, before it was entirely clear how WDGNWAS? was going to settle into the meta.

Second, on paper, WDGNWAS? really does look scary, like it should be broken. As one decisionmaker wrote, "You can be completely locked down, or you can allow the opponent to build a fleet literally anywhere they want. For example, for an Overwhelmed deck [Ed. Note: I think he meant Outgunned, which was still pre-errata at the time] that stocks enough, the opponents choice becomes lock down my crew or have the armada appear right at your location, regardless of quadrant. I don't think any card in the game should be that lose-lose."

Third -- and this seems to have proved decisive -- regardless of its effects on the players, WDGNWAS? was messing with Design. Because WDGNWAS? could download any ship, any where, any time, regardless of affiliation/quadrant/anything else, Design had to consider it every single time they made a ship. "This ship is good, but does it work with WDGNWAS?" was apparently asked a lot. I'm not directly aware of any actual cards that were changed, cut, or affected by this, but they may well exist in the Cut File somewhere -- and asking the question so often became annoying.

So Design pushed WDGNWAS? onto the ban list, making it the only card currently on the list (at least in part) because of how annoying it was to design around.

Full disclosure: Of all the cards on the ban list, WDGNWAS? is the one I have had the most vocal opinions about for years and years and years. I tried to be objective anyway, but you should know about that risk of bias.

You Are A Monument

And we close out with an easy one.

OTF made this card into a rule (OTF Rule #7: Victory Conditions, Clause 3), albeit with slight variations (the rule provides an exception if nobody seeded an AQ mission; the card had no exceptions). If it's both a card and a rule, they can stack in an unbalanced way, so the card got the banhammer. Since YAAM will (likely) always be needed as-is in Open, it's never going to be errata'd and, I expect, is never coming off the ban list.

Now you know why every card on the ban list in December 2019/January 2020 is there! Thanks for reading over the past few weeks! And always remember:

"Kivas/Red Alert/Temporal Rift/Wormholes/Q/Borg Ship is not 1E. Those are merely cards. 1E is about being able to go anywhere and do almost anything. 1E is about the spaceline, time travel, quadrants, away team battles, solving missions and facing dilemmas. If you can dream it you can do it."
~Jeremy Commandeur, 1E Director, 31 May 2009

[Takket]

I remember getting the AGT set and I wasn't playing anymore at the time, and knowing this was 1E's funeral, and having no interest in 2E, I just sleeved the cards without much thought.

Years later when CC renewed my interest in the game as I discovered the virtual sets, I remember looking at SSI one day and thinking... WHAT the <expletive> is this <expletive> <expletive>????????

That was honestly the SECOND card I remember absolutely HATING when I saw it and I couldn't believe you could get this MONSTROSITY at speed.

The FIRST card I ever hated was The Guardian.... just because it is hideous. lol

[Discovery rox]

i think the fix for shapeshift inhibitor is pretty obvious: go back to what berserk changeling implied it was going to be, something that interacts with changelings.

probably a piece of equipment that exposes any changelings that are inflitrating at its location at the end of its turn, and maybe also prevents playing any morphing cards at its location.

sure its a radical change in the card and type, akin to the kind of radical changes that a few 2E conversions experienced. while im not a fan of those drastic changes, in this case i think its actually fixing a drastic change: i dont think anyone who saw shapeshift inhibitor on release, if they remembered its presence on berserk changeling, thought it was anything like they had imagined or what berserk changeling implied it might be like. and its certainly not very thematic.

[BCSWowbagger]

I finally did Sherlock Holmes:

Sherlock Holmes

Holmes has been on the ban list longer than there's been a ban list. He's one of a very small number of cards to get called out for an specific ban in X-List.

The reasons for the ban were summed up in a private forum in 2009, well before OTF design got underway:

He is very overused. There is no good reason not to play him. Even in the DQ.

If I can outplay you in getting cards out of my hand, I win. Fun for experienced players, but no fun for everybody else.

Plus, he is a draw engine you can't easily nullify. I can Kevin Kivas or Vision. I can come commandeer your Nor to shut down Process Ore. Sherlock can just sit at your HQ or outpost and be exceptionally hard to get rid off. You either have to not keep cards in hand, or give your opponent a big advantage.

He is also a draw engine with little/no cost. He has no upkeep, he costs one card play and then is permanent. You don't have to do anything to draw cards with him. No guys need to be present, you don't have to move ships or discard cards, you just get free draws forever.

Someone countered: "It is a great equalizer." Another person responded:

However, it is not actually an equalizer. You can free to play, spend, or otherwise discard those "equalizing cards" during your turn. In turn, the more cards you use, the more cards you draw. In effect, you are rewarded with drawing cards because you played more cards than your opponent. It's a rich get richer mechanic- which is a very bad idea. Further, most often, the worst case scenario with Sherlock Holmes is that the opponent will turn the game into "draw, go, one card in hand". Which is no worse than as though you didn't have Sherlock in the first place.

It went on the ban list and stayed there.

A month after that conversation, Holmes's situation got even worse. The release of Tribunal of Q led Jason Red to a nasty discovery:

Turn 1 - Download Sherlock Holmes. Give up my card draw to download and use Obelisk of Masaka - pitch my 7 cards, and convert all of the Masaka draws to downloads, filling up my play area with all the cards I could possibly need.

Turn 2 - Draw with Sherlock.

Sherlock's fate on the ban list was already sealed, but this made it even worse.

Interestingly, there was a general consensus on how to fix Sherlock:

Once each turn, if your opponent has more cards in hand, you may draw a card (two if Watson present)

I'm not sure what happened to that fix, but it appears to have simply fallen by the wayside -- I don't see records of it being tested or anything.

[BCSWowbagger]

And Smooth As An Android's Bottom:

Smooth As An Android's Bottom

After the initial OTF banlist broke the back of the Holy Hexany, innovative deckbuilders managed to discover something that was -- briefly -- known as "New Hexany".

I say "briefly" because OTF's decisionmakers at the time acted quickly (as they tended to do). The first forum reports of New Hexany were in March 2011, but reports were scattered. The 1E Department spent the next month just trying to gather enough information to figure out how New Hexany actually worked.

Of course, it was Jeremy Commandeur who figured it out and demo'd it for The Powers That Be. Commandeur ran Smooth+Beyond The Subatomic at an April 2011 Regional. It was placed an internal watch list the very next day. Commandeur didn't post his deck until mid-May, which was just when the forum was starting to complain about New Hexany. Decision to ban Smooth and Beyond the Subatomic (which has since been errata'd) was made two weeks later. Ban released in the regular monthly update for July 2011.

Unclear to me whether it should still be banned, because I don't understand the combo. I will say that, internally, Smooth was considered the "lynchpin" of New Hexany, and decisionmakers were more on the fence about banning Beyond The Subatomic (but banned both to be certain New Hexany was dead before Worlds 2011).

FUN FACT: New Hexany was considered far more threatening in online games than other venues. This was because it relied on having a bunch of copies of cards from The Motion Pictures, which had become very expensive, in a time before universal printability.

[AllenGould]

And Smooth As An Android's Bottom:

Unclear to me whether it should still be banned, because I don't understand the combo.

I don't remember the exact ins-and-outs, but it looks similar to the problem with OG Hexany - once you have enough ways to get things out of the discard pile, putting things *in* the discard pile stops being a cost and becomes a complementary draw engine. (From the deck list, he points out that you just use Cybernetics Expertise to get your androids back from discard if Beyond dumps them there, and I expect he did the same with Smooth as well.)

At a glance, it doesn't look *as* bad as OG Hexany, but then I think the only way to do that is to win the tournament before pairings...

[Ensign Q]

I think its not good design to just ban every draw manipulation available (except mutation). then give 22nd the macoshuffle lol. at least errata the cards, so they dont combo too hard or find solutions. (remove discard piles from the game)

that said, any form of "combodeck" seems to be banned right now. That just decreases depth and variety and banishes a certain playertype.
When I read about the Cochrane memorial deck back then, I was very interested about the game again, since we only knew premiere draw-report solverdecks.

[AllenGould]

that said, any form of "combodeck" seems to be banned right now.

The problem is combo decks are like battle decks, where they don't appear when they're just competitive, but only when they're dominant - and a lot of players don't find them fun to play against.

Original Hexany was a reliable first-turn win. So it was entirely possible for you to spend 30 minutes on a game where your only interaction was the seed phase and revealing 6-8 dilemmas. The rest was watching them faff about as their engineered their deck and hand. Just a half hour of drawing, discarding, putting cards back in hand, shuffling... it's really tedious.

The problem IMO is that unlike Magic, a combo deck isn't really it's own thing. A Magic combo decks goes off and wins. 1E combo decks are just solvers that don't believe in letting the opponent have a turn.

[BCSWowbagger]

Christmas vacation is over, I'm back, babes:

Subspace Schism

MilesStuntDouble's list says this was banned for being countered by a card (Writ), which -- like many cards on the first-generation ban list -- was enough to make it presumed broken and bannable.

The official ban announcement states, "Subspace Schism – Discard decks just love this card. Opponents getting hit with multiple of these cards are not as happy."

The reality seems to have been more complicated than that, but only slightly. Despite being targeted by a card, it was passed over in the initial ban list, then added shortly after. It seems to have been missed in the initial ban list only as an oversight, since it was on the initial ban list sent to playtesting.

Schism was described internally as "plaguing" tournaments, it had been one of the cards targeted by X-List, and it was one of the cards that had homebrew errata in the Revised Swedish homebrew format. All this meant that, once 1E staff realized Schism had been missed on the initial ban list, it went back on the list with little further discussion.

FWIW, they had a point. Last year, the Errata team considered Subspace Schism for parole -- that is, unbanning it with no changes -- alongside Black Hole. Black Hole survived playtesting and was re-released. Schism did not. Subspace Schism x32 was extremely frustrating for the victim (for reasons Wambundu has explained elsewhere), and probably was bad enough to keep Schism on the ban list... but Subspace Schism x19 + Heisenberg Compensators x13 + MEDICAL-drain dilemmas was absolutely fatal. The Schism user would simply nullify any drawn MEDICAL, then also nullify any drawn cards that might help break out of the Schism cycle.

(Thanks to everyone on the public forums who helped out with that. I didn't tell you that you were helping Playtesters find issues with Schism, but that's exactly what you did!)

[Ensign Q]

coming from the dixon hill post

tl;dw
"we continue to copy paste the same arguments yearly since 20 years to ensure ourselves the banlist is reasonable"

[BCSWowbagger]

Today's crop:
The Big Picture
The Sheliak
Time Travel Pod

Just three left!

The Big Picture

OTF made this card into a rule (OTF Rule #7: Victory Conditions, Clause 2). If it's both a card and a rule, they can stack in an unbalanced way, so the card got the banhammer. Since The Big Picture will always be needed as-is in Open, it's never going to be errata'd and, I expect, is never coming off the ban list.

The Sheliak

MilesStuntDouble says it was banned for being targeted by a card (Temporal Vortex), and that appears to be the case. It appeared on MSD's first draft of a ban list (which was, indeed, mostly just "cards countered by cards"). This list was reposted internally a few times over the next couple of years (growing slightly in the process), and heavily informed the first draft of the OTF ban list. Sheliak never came off.

The 1E Department occasionally discussed the card in subsequent years. It could lock players out of needed missions, or destroy their only reporting location, and OTF frowns on that sort of thing (as did Decipher, by the end).

Until next time!

Time Travel Pod

TTP is an artifact (meaning it can only be accessed in the midgame) that removes a single ship from the game for 5 turns. When TTP was released, the game was something like 30 turns long, and you could count on getting TTP by maybe Turn 10. Losing a ship for 5 turns meant it was gone for about 15% of the game overall, or 25% of the remaining game.

By 2012, when it was banned, the game was something like 8-9 turns long, with missions solvable by Turn 3 or 4. TTP thus removed a ship for roughly 60% of the game, or 100% of the remaining game! Against a deck that merely had a big ship and a large crew, this stung badly. Against a deck that depends on a particular ship (e.g. Home Away From Home, Fed Flag Renewed), it was a game-killer.

Once Temporal Rift got banned (for similar reasons) and errata'd to be defensive-only, TTP got big as the "next-best" card.

Banning TTP was controversial. The CC believed, for a considerable time, that the meta would adjust to it, counters would proliferate, and that it would become less popular once Insurrection decks (all the rage at the time) became less popular. It was placed on an internal watch list -- deliberately not banned -- in November 2011. (Fun fact: almost nothing else on that watch list got banned, except Ceti Eel, which took seven years.)

But the darn thing kept winning events. In May 2012, the Rules Committee (responsible for the ban list at the time) considered three approaches:

1. Ban it for now, errata at some point.
2. Change the rules (Glossary/CRD) slightly so that can use STP to return-to-hand a TTP'd ship.
3. Change the OTF seeding rules to have seeds at "your missions" get placed before seeds at "opponent's missions" (but still keep self-seeds encountered last).

This argument is why #1 prevailed:

The original intention of the ban list was "isolate and contain" until a solution is devised. I am not a fan of changing rules to support a single card, so my advice is to BAN TTP and revisit when time and resources allow.

At almost the same time, a large public forum thread went up about TTP. The thread makes for good reading and contains much intelligent discussion of TTP (both pro and con). It's solid research fodder for anyone working on errata to it years later. But, after months of scrutiny, the fate of TTP was likely already sealed before the thread went up. It was banned in the next rules update, on 10 June 2012.

[BCSWowbagger]

Turned out I couldn't resist doing the final three and being finished with this list for the foreseeable future. So here's the final three, and there are some SURPRISES in there, even for me:

Supernova
What Does God Need With A Starship?
You Are A Monument (no surprises on that one, promise)

Tox Utaht

Nobody has a problem with Tox Utaht. Tox was banned in 2016 so that Supernova could be unbanned. Since you can't generally play Supernova without Tox Utaht, this boiled down to the same thing... except that Bashir Founder can now download Supernova without a Tox Utaht against large armadas.

So why was Supernova banned in the first place?

Well, it's an extremely powerful card. It erases a location when played -- all ships, facilities, dilemmas, points, cards played on location, everything. It can even hit homeworlds, unlike almost everything else in the game (including Ravenous Hunger).

On the other hand, Supernova's an extremely expensive card: you first need to earn Tox Utaht (an Artifact, thus not available until midgame), then you need to card play Tox Utaht as an event on a subsequent turn, then you need to card play Supernova on another subsequent turn.

This was apparently expensive enough for many years. Decipher never created a real counter (although Persistence of Memory may count). It was banned in X-List (which banned all Premiere verbs and artifacts), but was not included on the initial OTF ban list in 2010. For 2010 and half of 2011, Supernova was perfectly legal.

Then it was banned in July 2011. This is especially interesting, because (according to contemporary internal research) Supernova did not appear in any public deck lists during the 12 months leading up to its ban. What happened between 2010 and 2011?

In February 2011, the Rules Master received a report from a playgroup:

Hey Allen,

We just had a 1E Revised Format tourney here in [town], yesterday. (skill level/experience: me-16 years, [person 2]. - 3 prior/recent events, [player 3] - 1 prior event 15 months ago, and [player 4] - 1st ever 1E gig). [player 5] sat it out as he had other plans, but, lent his current nasty deck to [player 4] and explained how to play it.

To summarize, two Tox Uthats, and two Supernovas.
[player 4] destroyed all chance of either [P2] or [P3] even remotely having an opportunity to play the game by nuking each of their sole/prime/primary facility location. Why are these two despicable cards not on our Ban List?

I really believe they both should be. We're having a hard enough time getting more players to try 1E, and I thought that was the point of the ban list?

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

The Rules Committee discussed the issue and decided that no action should be taken without evidence of other metas being affected.

Over the next several months, that particular playgroup continued to ask the Rules Committee to ban Supernova and/or Tox Utaht, because their meta was being dominated by this combo and new players were being driven away. (I won't identify the playgroup, but suffice to say that their meta was fairly casual and isolated from high-level play.) Rules continued to resist this for several months, thinking that no card should be banned over a single playgroup (even if the card is wrecking that playgroup).

However, the decision was finally made that newbies (around the world) were too vulnerable to this particular card. They would go into games not knowing about it, not knowing about counters to it, and end up suffering a devastating NPE in one of their first 1E games. Supernova was added to the ban list in July 2011.

Rulesmaster Allen explained to the community in September 2011:

Supernova - I don't have the decklist handy, but we started getting reports of decks running double Tox, double Supernova. Wiping out a mission (and quite possibly your facilities) is a crazy powerful ability, and all the other methods of doing it have been banned already (Black Hole, Sheliak). You can argue that the cost of solving a mission is balance enough (and some days I'd agree with you), but it was decided to err on the side of caution.

(Allen was being generous; he was not a big fan of this ban.)

The playgroup in question is not currently active.

I went into this one expecting it to be very easy. Supernova is an extremely powerful card. I assumed it had been banned because somebody broke it and it took over the worldwide meta. That's how most cards get banned (like Time Travel Pod). But what I found instead was a card banned to essentially protect one isolated playgroup that was having trouble with modern pacing and counters, and a decision-making team divided about that choice.

I've tried to avoid giving direct opinions in most of these entries, but it now seems to me that Tox Utaht could come back with minimal changes to Supernova -- in light of Black Hole's successful reintroduction to the game, perhaps no changes at all. And I couldn't be more surprised about that.

What Does God Need With A Starship?

When all cards became printable, on 3 February 2014, WDGNWAS? was instantly at the top of everyone's watch list. This seemed like the quintessential case of a powerful card that had been held in check solely by the high rarity of cards from The Motion Pictures. It gives you a ship! At interrupt speed! Potentially more than once each turn! And it locks up your opponent otherwise! Whoa!

But, after about nine months of people trying to break WDGNWAS?, the community kinda gave up. It turned out to be fairly hard to use WDGNWAS? in high multiples. Kris Sonsteby (who wrote the linked post above) told me he'd cut it out of all his decks within three months of writing that post. Its high-water mark was having seven copies in Stefan Slaby's winning Worlds Day One deck in 2014, but the same deck finished third in Day Two, and the only other person to run WDGNWAS? at all was Kris Sonsteby (two copies; also, Jason Drake's deck notes show he teched against WDGNWAS?). Decklists show WDGNWAS? was popular but was not winning all that many tournaments, especially not at high levels. I saw this (and still see it today) as an impressive example of the meta absorbing and adapting to a powerful new(ish) card very well. WDGNWAS? settled into a niche, but never dominated.

In February 2015, one year after printability, it was banned anyway.

Why? Three reasons:

First, a "soft" decision to ban it had been made several months earlier, back in October, before it was entirely clear how WDGNWAS? was going to settle into the meta.

Second, on paper, WDGNWAS? really does look scary, like it should be broken. As one decisionmaker wrote, "You can be completely locked down, or you can allow the opponent to build a fleet literally anywhere they want. For example, for an Overwhelmed deck that stocks enough, the opponents choice becomes lock down my crew or have the armada appear right at your location, regardless of quadrant. I don't think any card in the game should be that lose-lose."

Third -- and this seems to have proved decisive -- regardless of its effects on the players, WDGNWAS? was messing with Design. Because WDGNWAS? could download any ship, any where, any time, regardless of affiliation/quadrant/anything else, Design had to consider it every single time they made a ship. "This ship is good, but does it work with WDGNWAS?" was apparently asked a lot. I'm not directly aware of any actual cards that were changed, cut, or affected by this, but they may well exist in the Cut File somewhere -- and asking the question so often became annoying.

So Design pushed WDGNWAS? onto the ban list, making it the only card currently on the list (at least in part) because of how annoying it was to design around.

Full disclosure: Of all the cards on the ban list, WDGNWAS? is the one I have had the most vocal opinions about for years and years and years. I tried to be objective anyway, but you should know about that risk of bias.

You Are A Monument

And we close out with an easy one.

OTF made this card into a rule (OTF Rule #7: Victory Conditions, Clause 3), albeit with slight variations (the rule provides an exception if nobody seeded an AQ mission; the card had no exceptions). If it's both a card and a rule, they can stack in an unbalanced way, so the card got the banhammer. Since YAAM will (likely) always be needed as-is in Open, it's never going to be errata'd and, I expect, is never coming off the ban list.

Now you know why every card on the ban list in December 2019/January 2020 is there! Thanks for reading over the past few weeks!

[jadziadax8]

In February 2011, the Rules Master received a report from a playgroup:

Hey Allen,

We just had a 1E Revised Format tourney here in [town], yesterday. (skill level/experience: me-16 years, [person 2]. - 3 prior/recent events, [player 3] - 1 prior event 15 months ago, and [player 4] - 1st ever 1E gig). [player 5] sat it out as he had other plans, but, lent his current nasty deck to [player 4] and explained how to play it.

To summarize, two Tox Uthats, and two Supernovas.
[player 4] destroyed all chance of either [P2] or [P3] even remotely having an opportunity to play the game by nuking each of their sole/prime/primary facility location. Why are these two despicable cards not on our Ban List?

I really believe they both should be. We're having a hard enough time getting more players to try 1E, and I thought that was the point of the ban list?

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

The Rules Committee discussed the issue and decided that no action should be taken without evidence of other metas being affected.

Over the next several months, that particular playgroup continued to ask the Rules Committee to ban Supernova and/or Tox Utaht, because their meta was being dominated by this combo and new players were being driven away. (I won't identify the playgroup, but suffice to say that their meta was fairly casual and isolated from high-level play.) Rules continued to resist this for several months, thinking that no card should be banned over a single playgroup (even if the card is wrecking that playgroup).

However, the decision was finally made that newbies (around the world) were too vulnerable to this particular card. They would go into games not knowing about it, not knowing about counters to it, and end up suffering a devastating NPE in one of their first 1E games. Supernova was added to the ban list in July 2011.

Rulesmaster Allen explained to the community in September 2011:

Supernova - I don't have the decklist handy, but we started getting reports of decks running double Tox, double Supernova. Wiping out a mission (and quite possibly your facilities) is a crazy powerful ability, and all the other methods of doing it have been banned already (Black Hole, Sheliak). You can argue that the cost of solving a mission is balance enough (and some days I'd agree with you), but it was decided to err on the side of caution.

(Allen was being generous; he was not a big fan of this ban.)

The playgroup in question is not currently active.

Soooo, I'm reading this part as very much a case of "This is why we can't have nice things." Some Local Legend was being a dick and caused the rest of the play group to quit. Amirite?

[Armus]

Worse, the local legend couldn't even be bothered to play his own degenerate deck and loaned it to another player.

At least have the balls to own your NPE creating experience.

[AllenGould]

A note on WDGNWAS? - You won't find a lot of cards in the cut file, because cool ships that would do something tended to get spiked before they made the file at all.