Counters were removed a few years ago and will not be printed in new sets. The color wheel was reworked at the same time, and the design teams moved to creature heavy sets.

WotC went after players like me who played creatureless decks almost 100% of the time. They hated combo decks, so they killed counterspell. Also, I would draft counter high, and suddenly draft became a critter race... Removing counter didn't really have much impact on sealed formats.

Counter slowed the game. So what. Games went a full hour and tourneys went three days. It's the same as poker time-wise. In general matches are about 1/3 as long under the new design restrictions.

Anyway, wotc can't keep up with themselves. Apparently there's a turn zero kill deck (classic or t1 deck) that kills you on your opponent's first turn...

I challenge you to play in a sealed deck tourney with three different products (like at the end of a set cycle) and see how many times you get pounded in the first three rounds with cats who drop tow or three mythic rares.

I guess yer right - people like me are bitching about change. I guess that's the whole idea of the game.

I've recently gone back to playing games I only have to buy ONCE!

ubercat wrote:Counters were removed a few years ago and will not be printed in new sets. The color wheel was reworked at the same time, and the design teams moved to creature heavy sets.

WotC went after players like me who played creatureless decks almost 100% of the time. They hated combo decks, so they killed counterspell. Also, I would draft counter high, and suddenly draft became a critter race... Removing counter didn't really have much impact on sealed formats.

Counter slowed the game. So what. Games went a full hour and tourneys went three days. It's the same as poker time-wise. In general matches are about 1/3 as long under the new design restrictions.

Anyway, wotc can't keep up with themselves. Apparently there's a turn zero kill deck (classic or t1 deck) that kills you on your opponent's first turn...

I challenge you to play in a sealed deck tourney with three different products (like at the end of a set cycle) and see how many times you get pounded in the first three rounds with cats who drop tow or three mythic rares.

I guess yer right - people like me are bitching about change. I guess that's the whole idea of the game.

I've recently gone back to playing games I only have to buy ONCE!

They have stopped printing the specific card "counterspell",
but they still print counters in sets
they felt "counterspell" was way too powerful
so they created more hard counters
just different costs.

Vintage is where you can play just about everything
and sure there is a deck that can kill on turn 1
but that was always there.
you need to get extremely lucky to have it happen
and it can be stopped
but that's vintage - and mostly for tournament play
i really enjoy playing casually
i don't really buy that many cards,
maybe we'll do a draft of a new set
and if something really jumps out, i'll but singles
but i've got plenty of cards
friends to trade with
and that gives me an unlimited amount of decks i can create