Banhammer!

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/161a

Not that it affects many of us here, but:

Spoiler:

Mental Misstep has come and gone. That was fast...

I feel fortunate that I was not burned on any of these cards (didn't fight to acquire them, didn't make any money trading them). Maybe Mental Misstep, but that was a small investment.

I was expecting some part of that 12-post deck to take a hit, wasn't sure it would be Cloudpost but it makes sense. Maybe now Vesuva will drop again so I can pick some up.
I'm surprised by the rest of the Modern bans. I didn't think GSZ was that big a deal. Not sure Rite being gone is going to be enough to hamper Storm.
I don't really understand the axing of Ponder and Preordain. I guess they filter too well or something.
And Shoal surprised me. I figured the bans to make Control actually viable would have led to Shoal being hated out. Guess don't want to worry about it.

The card choices for the Extended bans don't surprise me, considering they decided to ban those cards in most other formats. What shocked me is that they actually bothered to do anything with Extended.

Don't know what to think about Misstep being banned almost everywhere. I'd heard the odd comment that it'd done some bad things to Legacy though.

Ponder AND Preordain seems odd. Is that to stop the Pyromancer deck? That one confuses me.
3 decks that i can think of are completely neutered with that ban.

I think the Ponder and Preordain bans are meant to hinder all the Red/Blue decks (Ascension, Swath/Grapeshot, and Splinter Twin). I suppose the reasoning is they were providing too much consistancy, making it too easy to find the needed cards. Maybe they felt the cards were just simply overused. Dunno

Ponder and Preordain are huge combo enablers. It's probably to nerf combo a bit.

Yeah, I think Wizards is just trying to nerf the combo decks that were so prevalent in Philly, since combo pretty much ran the roost. It could be they're trying to make agro and control more competitive as well by removing a lot of the early disruption/draw and made combo so good.

As for GSZ, I guess it's meant to stop people from tutoring up Dryad Arbor or KoR every game.

I'm surprised they didn't ban Emrakrul as well...