I think the unspoken idea behind the ban of Seething Song (which hurts a rogue deck like my own Koth Big Red too) was precisely to kill two birds with one stone and get rid of all those degenerate, non-interactive combo decks like Hive Mind and Dragonstorm the average player hates so much to face (we don't have to look only at the PTQ crowd here, we know that WotC primarily worries about the vast majority of faceless players who enjoy the game and its formats, not the handful of pro/semi-pro players who are able to adapt to anything.)

I like to cap your article by writing down the current status of the Modern ban list. 30 cards are banned, we can roughly divide them into these general categories:

1. Cards banned to hinder Affinity (6): Ancient Den; Great Furnace; Seat of the Synod; Tree of Tales; Vault of Whispers; Chrome Mox
2. Cards banned to hinder Storm (4): Ponder; Preordain; Rite of Flame; Seething Song
3. Cards banned to hinder Jund/Zoo (3): Bloodbraid Elf; Wild Nacatl; Punishing Fire
4. Cards banned to hinder Dredge (2): Dread Return; Golgari Grave-Troll
5. Cards banned to hinder Caw-Blade (2): Jace, the Mind Sculptor; Stoneforge Mystic
6. Cards banned to hinder Control/Faerie (3): Ancestral Vision; Bitterblossom; Mental Misstep
7. Cards banned to kill the archetypes built around them (6): Blazing Shoal; Cloudpost; Dark Depths; Glimpse of Nature; Hypergenesis; Sword of the Meek
8. Cards banned because, c'mon, of course they are (2): Skullclamp; Umezawa's Jitte
9. Cards banned to prevent their ubiquitous presence (2): Green Sun's Zenith; Sensei's Divining Top (Punishing Fire might well belong to this category too)

I think Ancestral Vision will be back soon, because it didn't really make much sense to begin with. And I believe Bitterblossom might be back as well at some point, on the same basis of "controlled reintroduction" they used to bring back Valakut, which seems a successful move so far.

I hope your connection problem is only temporary. I liked your videos on the new interface. Very informative and, I guess, very much in the spirit of Erik F.

You speak like we're having a combo outbreak, which we haven't. Quite the contrary, we're watching more and more players abandoning combo. For one combo decks going well, there are 10 or 15 aggro decks ending undefeated. FoW plays exactly in that direction, and that's not something we should wish for, because it's like taking an ecosystem with a predator at the top of the food chain, and introducing more of that predator rather than its natural enemies. That's not what you do to regulate an ecosystem, it's actually the opposite.
Like, I've been playng a few times the Entomb/Exhume/Iona deck, which is seriously unfun and moronic to play with and against, only to scare monocolored players into doing something different and less safe the next time. More complex and outside-the-box solutions (you might notice that ALL of Clan Leys actions are aimed at that). A large FoW presence would push them back in the safer route of the Goblin Guides and Lightning Bolts to the face. Essentially demolishing all the work we're doing.

The Modern ban philosophy, in a nutshell, is this: you ban to regulate the meta according to criteria of diversity. You don't ban looking at power levels. You ban looking at statistics. In our case, you don't ban Doomsday, because statistically is moot. You don't ban Lion Eye's Diamond, because statistically is irrelevant. You don't ban Swords to Ploswhares because it doesn't define an archetype, it's transversal. You ban something AFTER it's statistically proven that it affects the meta in the direction of strategic uniformity, which in turn causes a diminishing inflow of players in the format.

Our debate about FoW is THEORETICAL. I assume odds are about 90% that nothing will ever happen on that front. Theoretically speaking, though, that's my position, and my rationate for that position, which is the rationale behind all the banning AND unbanning in the TribAp list, based on the reality of the tournament.

The "feel bad" moments have to be measured and evaluated. People feel bad every time they lose. People ask for banning of the last card they got played against that they couldn't deal with. Again, tournament statistics help you. Players' feedbacks help you (when they're rational, and God knows if I don't get PMed with about every possible complain during events). Polls help you. Researches help you.
For instance, Show & Tell is negligible right now, since you can go back and see that there hasn't been a Show & Tell deck going undefeated in pretty much forever, and very few played at all (we had 12 copies total in the whole 2012). Our players don't risk to enter the tournament and "feel bad" about Show & Tell, because statistics say Show & Tell decks are currently 0.33% of the total.
Moreso, if a player gets beaten by a card like Dream Halls, that's very different than smashing your face on something like FoW. You see Dream Halls, you think it's cool, you look it up, you see that's just 2 tix, you maybe plan on buying it and playing it (it happened). That's the process. On the other hand, you try to go off with your thing against a permission player, you bait him, you wait for the right moment, you play it the best you can, then FoW happens, and you just give up, because you know as a budget player you'll never be able to compete, you feel like you can't be in that league. I assure you I'm already collecting this kind of feedback as of right now.

I have, it was my very first article actually. Go back and check it out!

Now that at least is more complete information. Is there a link to this announcement somewhere? I don't recall seeing it in the MTGO groups or on the main site.

I am not sure if this will depress shocklands anymore than normal but it will definitely make them more accessible for a while.

However my thinking on this is that it will be pretty rare to get a good land as opposed to one already readily available so playing the lottery with this will probably a not worthwhile event.

==edit==

and here is the link:

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/1156

That's the deck from the Cheap Casual Classic article that was posted on Tuesday. It just has a sideboard added to it that wasn't in the other article.

Paul, Wizards announced earlier this week that the basic land slot of each booster will be replaced in DGM with one nonbasic land. This slot is kind of like the way each INN pack had a flip-card in it, and rare and mythic rares will show up in this slot presumably about as often as they did in that. They said the rares that can show in that slot will be the shocklands, and the mythic rare is a new land as yet unspoiled from DGM.

That makes no sense at all...3rd sets of a cycle rarely have basic lands. None of the shocklands or guild gate lands for that matter will be in Dragon Maze either...they are in the two prior sets as we have known all along.

Something that would probably be worth mentioning: Some details for Dragon's Maze have been released and of particular note is there will be no basic lands. The guildgates and *shocklands* will replace them. Expect the prices of the shocklands to be heavily depressed.

The presence of a sideboard differentiating this format from regular legacy is one of my key points in favor of FoW. If I want to beat aggro, I can just play a bunch of board sweepers and have that fairly well-covered. If I don't want to lose to combo, I have to be prepared in my maindeck for several possible variations. I cannot just disrupt them all with hatebears or narrower answers. This gives combo a huge natural advantage in the format, provided they can build the combo within the format's restrictions. There are several viable and powerful combo decks that have done just that, repeatedly.

Combo decks may provide variety to the metagame, but they are also a huge turnoff to many players. If it was my first Tribal Apocalypse event and I lost to Show and Tell or Charbelcher, or had somebody cast Dream Halls or Cephalid Illusionist and then spend 5 minutes durdling around to reach some arbitrary win condition while I sat there helpless, that's a huge "feel bad" moment.

You seem to approve of the Modern ban list philosophy, but they have made it an explicit priority to ban any combo deck that went off before Turn 4 reliably. We would have to ban 20+ cards to do that, which I don't suggest... or we can just have more FoW around to provide at least SOME risk to running combo. Make them water down their combo a bit by having to play Duress effects or Silence or Xantid Swarm or something -- or have a legitimate plan B if your key spell gets countered, like combo decks have been doing for 15 years. Wrath of God and its pals (or my preference, Firespout) already act as an effective check on aggro, but the metagame is currently lacking an equivalent check on combo, and this just puts all the archetypes on an equal footing.

This is a send up of the Asst Ed weeks at Marvel in past times?

Ok, maybe I wasn't clear in the debate: I do NOT want to stop the combo decks! I do NOT want to keep them in checks, because they provide variety to the meta, and are a part of the rock-paper-scissors system you often mention. And they can be built in a budget too: think of Living End or any Elf endgame or reanimator (but the examples are probably in the hundreds here, what we mean with "combo" is basically "a deck that relies on resolving a particular spell to acquire crucial board advantage"). Budget players aren't necessarily aggro. You'll PUSH them into being fast aggro only by having FoW show up with a higher frequency. And that's a change in the meta the power combo decks (the ones being watched) can't do, because they are rarely encountered by any given player (as the Watch List clearly shows). (That would possibly be true of FoW too, but if it's not - as I clearly stated in my debate part, IF being the keyword here - I'll intervene to restore balance.)

I can't put it into the T9 for the reasons I wrote above in my answer to romellos.

And again, the power level isn't in question here. I said I agree with you and I'm on record to say that FoW is mostly a bad card in Tribal. But it's not about what it does, it's about what a larger presence would entail. Does Seething Song look like an overpowered card to you? It's not, but it was crucial in manipulating the meta back to a desirable status. If, and I repeat IF there will be, say, 10 regular players playing FoW every week, that would mean your Average Combo Joe will face it frequently enough to decide he can't rely on his beloved Animate Dead anymore, so he'll either start playing something like RDW Elementals or will stop playing altogether because he's not interested in playing such a deck. 10 regular players with FoW will be presence enough to twist the meta in a direction of uniformity, and that will clearly asks for intervention, just like (actually: much more than) what Glimpse of Nature and Hypergenesis did back in the time.

Re: your other example of cards. Tarmogoyf doesn't change the meta in Tribal. Your average deck is equipped to deal with it. And it improves your efficiency, not hinder the opponent's battleplan.
And the mentioned T9 are a) currently in the meta as we know it right now; b) just the most efficient examples in their categories, but with dozens of possible replacements (Counterspell doesn't replace FoW, FoW is about an insurance vs key cards that doesn't force you to play draw-go, which can usually be played around; as a result, Counterspell doesn't affect the meta); c) affordable by every player. As I wrote, affordability is a factor here (although not the most relevant one) when you consider the impact of a card within a restricted community.

And I believe I said it before, but to compare Legacy and Legacy Tribal Wars is wrong to begin with. They are entirely different formats (the presence of a sideboard being the main difference). Tribal Wars is a unique format dealing with unique issues: Legacy is the name of the pool of cards it uses, but the similarities stop right there, so the staples in the former aren't the staples in the latter; the problems of the former aren't the problems of the latter.