Old School MTG: Why Are Cards Banned and Restricted in Old School MTG? Part 3

We've spent the first two parts of this series exploring fundamental game concepts and how they interact with the banned and restricted list. The idea here is that the banned and restricted list exists because some cards are unfun. These cards are unfun because they limit counterplay. As a game, Magic has to meet a certain threshold of fun to be viable. The card pool in Old School does not rotate, so the method we have to ensure that we meet a certain threshold of fun is to use the banned and restricted list. However, due to nostalgia, we apply the banned and restricted list inconsistently.

Based on how cards are developed now, we know that some of the original game concepts are unfun for many players. These includes things like ante, land destruction, and random discard. We know that these concepts are unfun, but let's look at why that is so.

Imagine if this card existed in Alpha:

Eric's Ancestral Time Lotus
(0)
Artifact
When ~ enters the battlefield, draw three cards. Take an extra turn after this one. (Tap), Sacrifice ~: Add three mana of any one color.

Broken, right? Clearly. Except, is it? Well, of course it is. It's three of the most broken cards in the game bolted together. But what makes them broken? What makes Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, and Time Walk so good? Two things: 1) Context and 2) Fundamentals.



Context
Cards are only good or bad relative to one another. You can only evaluate a card in comparison to the rest of the cards in the card pool. If basic lands tapped for three mana instead of one mana, Black Lotus would be less good than it is in a game where basic lands tap for only one mana. In other words, if you showed a Black Lotus to someone who has never played Magic before and asked them if it was good or not, they would literally have no context for evaluating that question.

This is important because in Old School we are stuck with the cards as they were originally designed and the card pool is fixed. New cards are not being added to the format without changing the format. This means that a card like Black Lotus will always be good in context. There is no scenario where a new card will be printed to bring power levels in line with Black Lotus.



Fundamentals
So, we know that Black Lotus is a good card relative to other cards in the sense that it makes other cards better. Why? Because the game has a fundamental "one land per turn" rule that acts as a speed governor on the way the game develops. In general, players only have access to one additional mana per turn. In practice, it is often less than one additional mana per turn due to the random distribution of lands in a deck.

Black Lotus breaks this rule, but in a profoundly distorting way by giving a player access to three additional mana in a single turn. In a game where spells are balanced mostly by mana cost, moving one player ahead by effectively three turns has a dramatic effect on what is possible. When a player moves ahead that quickly relative to the other player, it severely limits the opportunity for counterplay.

Restricted Cards
With a few exceptions, every card on the restricted list is there because those cards create an unfun experience. The reason why they create an unfun experience is because these cards are imbalanced in context to other cards in the card pool and/or fundamentally break one of the rules of the game so drastically that it limits the opportunity for counterplay.

(In)Consistency
So, why aren't the restricted cards banned then? Nostalgia. More players consider the unfun experience of being on the receiving end of these cards better than removing those cards entirely from the card pool. The trade-off we make is although these cards are clearly broken, we restrict them to only a single copy per deck instead of the typical four copies. This increases the variance of having access to these cards in a given game of Magic.

Why Are Cards Banned and Restricted in Old School MTG: Part 1
Why Are Cards Banned and Restricted in Old School MTG: Part 2
Why Are Cards Banned and Restricted in Old School MTG: Part 3
Why Are Cards Banned and Restricted in Old School MTG: Part 4