Most of my articles have aged well, a few of my articles have aged poorly, this one, however, has aged like Milk left in a car. Well, we need to live up to our mistakes, and I will too. When I wrote the second article, banding wasn't the sin in on itself as much as it was the simplification of the game.
The general sum I wrote was that bandings removal showed there were no sacred cows, and that would lead down the line to the removal of mechanics like fear and landwalk. I argued the game would contine to be simplified, and that the sin was no sacred cows. Since then, things have gotten complicated, both in how Magic at large is handled, and how sets are released.
When I wrote that article in 2018, Guilds block hadn't been released yet, phasing was on a one off card in a supplement product, and the game was mostly pushed through Standard format. Sure there were some confusing cards, but the game generally functioned how it always had.
Since writing that article, phasing has made its triumphant return, and while many of the other mechanics aren't standard legal, they've appeared on a large number of cards in Commander decks and subsets.
Honestly, Standard has become such a logistical mess, and is no longer the main focus of the game, that a worry that it was becoming increasingly simplified in a post FIRE world is laughable. When I had written the article, Throne of Eldraine had yet to be released, and with its Adventure mechanic we couldn't possibly imagine what was in store.
The Dungeon mechanic required you to keep track of one of three cards that sat in the command zone. As you ventured into the proverbial dungeon, you got effects, which ended usually in a big payoff. It required an extra peripheral to the game, but was hardly the only one.
Day/Night is like the Dungeon mechanic, but requiring it to be kept track of, for the rest of the game, even if only one card with it is played. It's tedious, its tiring, and unless you built a deck around it, it is boring. Maybe not confusing in the rules sense but confusing in the bookkeeping sense.
Companions: Cards that were basically guaranteed to be in your starting hand. One of the strongest mechanics ever designed, and one of the only ones ever to be errata'd for power level reasons across the board. Larrus of the Dream-Den was the first card (and as of this writing, only card) ever to get banned from Vintage for power level reasons.
Mutate was a pants on head mechanic that was the reason I downloaded arena, so I could figure it out. Actually not an entirely complicated mechanic, the rules for it were written like ass. I still sometimes forget you can't mutate humans.
Last year, turn 3 standard decks were a very real thing, with it sometimes being sarcastically called 'Mice: the Gathering'.
There are more, but you get the idea. Combine this with multiple boarders and art in the same set (I'll get to that later), and I can only dread what standard must look like these days.
I wish I had more to write on the topic, but the results speak for themselves. I'll end this with look at the reprint posted in this article.
Original Article: Gunnarson's Bag: The Second Sin: Banding
