I saw a post about someone wanting to stifle a turn 1 fetchland and this seemed like a really bad play to me and yet a lot of players in the comments were calling it a good play. Which made me wonder if I was off base by not using my spot removal pro-actively. This example is obviously very extreme, and pro-active vs reactive is a spectrum, but I felt like there might be an interesting discussion there.
In my mind, spot removal is best used as late as possible and only to deal with things that will win my opponent the game, or to deal with things that are preventing me from winning the game.
My main reason for this is that spot-removal is inherently kind of bad in multiplayer. Essentially I'm going down an answer, one opponent is going down a threat, and the two other opponents profit off of both. So I don't want to use it unless I absolutely have to.
Waiting allows for more opportunities for problems to be solved without me. Maybe "the problem" isn't as bad as I thought since there's no follow up. Maybe someone else will use their removal on it. Maybe the problem gets caught up in a boardwipe.
Also, having an opponent become archenemy doesn't seem that bad to me. Quite often the player that becomes the archenemy first will just lose due to being ganged up on and the player who pulls ahead second wins due to the dwindling supply of answers. By using spot removal proactively I'm preventing my opponents from flying too close to the sun.
Then again, I might be wrong. What do you think?