There's been a lot of chatter recently about whether to ban Jace, the Mind Sculptor. I'm inclined to side with the pro-banning school of thought, but I can't be sure that isn't thanks to bias. You see, I'm a new Magic player, and while I'd love to dip my toe into competitive Standard, Mr. Sculptor is standing in my way.

My experiences are not isolated. Away from the pro-level debate about format-warping cards, there's the stark reality of new players hoping to break into Magic's premiere format. Standard thrives on new blood, and Jace is clogging up the intake.

Banning him would certainly overhaul the Standard landscape, but it would also make a subtler impact. It would allow hundreds, if not thousands, of potential new players to start grinding PTQs and GPs.

Along with plenty of other newbies, I tapped my first land in late 2010. It was almost certainly to pay for a Plague Stinger or some other Infectious critter. At the inaugural gathering of my new playgroup, it quickly became clear that one mechanic was dominating. With our limited card pool, nobody had the tools to beat the poison deck. The landscape changed as our collections expanded, but it gave me an early understanding of what it's like to play in a one-sided metagame.

Travel six months into the future, and I'm starting to become fully aware of the world beyond our little cabal. I now know who Luis-Scott Vargas is and hear people talk in hushed tones about an architect named Mike Flores. These people all seem to have their crosshairs trained on Standard. That's where the excitement is, the real energy. With my nascent abilities coalescing, the lure of cobbling together a Standard deck becomes all the more appealing.

Then I hit a brick wall. How much for one card?!

A single Jace, the Mind Sculptor currently costs $99. Oh, and you'll need four of them. I don't know about you, but $400 is a large amount of money for me. There are viable non-Jace decks, but they are almost exclusively worse than those running the svelte blue planeswalker.

I have lots of fun playing with my friends over our figurative kitchen counter, so if I'm leaping into Standard, it's for competitive reasons. In the cutthroat world of tournament Magic, winning is as paramount as entertainment. With that in mind, why bother investing in a cheap alternative if there's little hope of ever being victorious?

It's also demoralizing from a deck-building perspective. I've enjoyed tinkering with goblins and artifacts, brewing lists to try and outdo my friends. I'd love to kick that up a notch and start wrapping my brain around the Standard conundrum, but why even bother when whatever I come up with will either require hundreds of dollars of Planeswalkers or be inferior to the decks that include them?

I'm hardly an expert. In fact, I'm a bona fide novice, so my opinions on potential bans are almost irrelevant. But I can tell you unequivocally that the reason I continue to merely watch Standard, instead of partaking in it, is the prevalence of Jace.

For me and my fellow tyros, our Standard dreams are mothballed. All are forced to wait patiently for another six months, living in hope that late 2011 will see the days of black-hole-money mythics draw to a close. Until then, enjoy your Caw-Blades; I'm going back to my friends.