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Comment by CocaKoala | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, I just came back to Magic after ~15 years out, and some basic utility has gotten more expensive. R used to get you 3 damage back in the day (Lighting Bolt), now it gets you two (Shock); you've gotta go up to 1R if you want the three damage. Counterspell was UU, but now the generic counter is 1UU, Cancel. You can sometimes get rides on top of that, like Sinister Sabotage is 1UU and gets you surveil 1 on top of the counter, but you're not going to get a straight up unconditional counter for two blue like you used to.

Looking through the one-drops in Standard right now, I don't see any vanilla 2/2; which one are you thinking of?

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You missed Delver of Secrets and Wild Nacatl while you were away. Death's Shadow is only very loosely a 1-drop creature, being more of a combo card, but perhaps still counts. In Standard right now the level is still above Savannah Lions.

Creatures were deliberately pushed to make them more central to competitive play, which is why you got absurd stuff like the Titans in M11. At the same time, Wizards never want a return to the degeneracy of Urza block and so spells are less powerful. They still mess up regularly (Splinter Twin/Deceiver Exarch was an oversight giving a reliably turn 4 combo kill, for example), but it's true that some stuff will probably never reach that peak power level again outside of combat.

Delver of Secrets is a 1/1 that can transform during your upkeep, so it might turn into a 3/2 on your second turn, but it's definitely still conditional and not guaranteed. Wild Nacatl is a 1/1 for G that gets +1/+1 for having a Mountain or a Plains, so again, you're not getting a vanilla 2/2 on turn 1 for it.

Also neither of those are in standard right now.

I think this is because they’ve had such a hard time balancing standard, that they’re afraid to put too much power into any set. There was a solid period of having a top tier deck emerging, and then being banned, then re-emerging, and being even more banned... I can’t find the quote, but I’m sure I remember Rosewater saying something to the effect of they can’t put fetches into standard because they’d be too powerful, for example.

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