so is Vivi the problem, or the cauldron?

Vivi

Unfortunately, even if cauldron was banned, it would probably just switch the meta to Vivi prowess being the dominant deck instead of Vivi cauldron. Very sad, but Vivi must go the way of Vivi. 😢

I mean... wouldn't it be worse if 20 of 37 of the best players in the format brought the same deck to a tournament and most of them ended up in the lower half of rankings?

6 of the Top 8 were Izzet Cauldron

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, can you elaborate? If the clearly most dominant deck failed to place or only had 1 or 2 showings in the top 8 we wouldn't be talking about the problem of there being a clearly dominant deck.

From the moment we saw over half the registered decks were IzzCau, we knew those decks had to wind up somewhere in the 37 ranks. Considering the participants, it would only make sense for those decks to wind up mostly in the top half, so while the 7/8 top spots is alarming, the general ranking isn't

It wouldn't be alarming if those 20 decks were relatively evenly spread throughout the results, but they're not. 54% of the decks were ViviCauldron and yet it accounts for about 70% of the top half of the results. Hence the alarm. That's potentially a very homogenized and unhealthy standard. Again.

Cauldron is a silly card

They did it, they fixed Standard!

I was telling my friends a month ago when the ban list came out that Vivi should've been banned too. Easy to get out, grows himself and burns with each noncreature spell (easy in red/blue), and generates free mana w/o tapping. I genuinely don't know what WotC were thinking when they designed him.

Probably the same as when nadu was designed

He's blameless

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