Gyokuyoutama

I started watching the pony show again at season 5. I'm legitimately curious to see whether anyone has watched season 5 or beyond. It seemed like all pony threads suddenly and mysteriously died right when season 4 ended.

They banned it four days after the normal round of bans. I've understood "emergency ban" to mean any ban that occurs outside the normal review schedule. Of course, the timing shows that they really could have banned it on time if they had been thinking ahead, so maybe it doesn't count for that reason, but if anything that makes things worse. I kind of want to dig through the archives to find their articles from Mirrodin standard, both with the skullclamp ban and with the later "affinity is dead this time for sure" set of bans. I'm guessing that there will be a lot of promises that explain how they check and double check things now so that this can never happen again. It's still amazing to me though that they let the combo get printed in the first place, given how obvious it was, and even more so that they didn't realize how combo-friendly an environment with poor instant speed removal and poor counterspells is.

Has there been an emergency ban for standard since Memory Jar? While searching for the answer I found this rather amusing article. I especially like this part:

Why would anyone preorder anything. Just the fact that everything is downloadable now defeats most of the purpose, even without getting into how many companies treat the official release as a public beta.

Team fortress is still wining 21 to 20 though, so it's okay.

I was going to wait until the last second to join up (i.e. when SPUF had actually officially died) but it's almost impossible to post anything with those database errors.