OK you seem to be talking about a bunch of things so let’s break it down…
Deviation from the model mulliganning strategy.If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that the ~25% chance of seeing a
Sol Ring isn’t realistic because people may mulligan less or mulligan away their
Sol Ring? Sure, but I think this strategy is a reasonable enough model and, anyway, the number doesn’t actually matter that much. Even if
Sol Ring showed up maybe 10% of the time turn 1 (and we’re not counting early-turn top decks, which obviously have a lesser but still-relevant impact) that’s quite a lot, and maybe more than most might expect.
Poor shufflingThe rules say people should shuffle to randomise their decks. They might not, but that’s not really something we can account for when thinking about cards, just as we also ignore all those tables that houserule
Sol Ring down to 0 mana and say it taps for 6, or the people who let you have it in the command zone.
Besides, does poor shuffling
increase or
decrease the chance of a
Sol Ring. Assuming no I’ll intent/cheating, one would expect that actually it would
balance out, certainly if the first shuffle is good. So either way I think this is a non-issue.
Impact of Sol RingA
totally different question is what impact
Sol Ring actually has. Now actually, I don’t think it
is “ruinous” or “degenerate”… but I do think you’re understating it. It’s far more impactful than a t2
Farseek,
which is already actually quite good. No or almost no semi-decent decks eschew 2-mana ramp, which implies that cards like
Farseek are really rather powerful. If they weren’t, people would skip them and just play impactful 2- and 3-drops on curve. Then,
consider that
Sol Ring is about (by some metric) four times more powerful than
Farseek! It also lets me play powerful cards on t2 than 2-mana ramp simply cannot enable by itself.
The whole point of this thread, in fact, is someone saying they’ve taken
Sol Ring out and they prefer it like that. Now, obviously, you may disagree, but the examples I gave before (turn 2 Rhystic,
Tithe or GAAIV) I think illustrate well just the impact that
Sol Ring can have.