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Mike Turian
The DCI is continually looking to do what is best for the health of the Vintage format.
The combination of Flash with only a few cards, leads to too many turn zero and turn one kills. The speed and ease of these Flash combos led to Flash being added to the Restricted list.
Merchant Scroll, Brainstorm and Ponder have all been added to the restricted list. Merchant Scroll tutors for the most powerful cards. Likewise the access power of Brainstorm and Ponder make finding the powerful restricted cards in a deck too easy.
Gush returns to the restricted list. Last year, we removed four cards from the Vintage Restricted list. Of those cards only Gush has proven problematic as a free card-drawing instant.
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We design and develop card sets far in advance of their real-world releases. As you read this, R&D is developing Magic sets that won't come out until 12-16 months from now. That means that if a deck shows up in the real world more powerful than we had anticipated, sometimes we can't react with new cards to answer that deck until two, three, or even four sets later.
But often, towards the end of a set's development cycle, we have a list of decks on our radar that the internal Future Future League has identified as being powerful. As we make new sets thereafter, we pay close attention to what we add to those known, powerful decks. Often, when the decks are fun and healthy for tournament environments, we happily add additional cards to sets that could be powerful additions players might or might not choose to add to those decks as the sets come out.
But sometimes the FFL finds that decks we have created with previous sets' cards may be more powerful than we had planned, and have risks of being unhealthy for tournaments if they get too powerful. When we detect that early enough, we are less likely to use new sets to power up the decks that could get out of hand if they get too good, and more likely to introduce hosers for those strategies.
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