Today Wizards of the Coast, makers ofMagic: The Gathering, released the most recent ban list for the game, and it’s quite a whopper. In total, six different cards were banned from four differentMagic: The Gatheringformats, and one card was unbanned in Historic.
One format that will certainly see its meta shifted by these bans is Brawl. Today The popular Commander Golos: Tireless pilgrim was banned. According to Wizard’s of the Coast, Golos was being used as a commander in 10 percent of all Brawl decks. His ability to search up specific lands made him far too easy to re-cast as a reoccurring threat. Even theaddition of the powerful commander Rhys The Redeemedwasn’t enough to knock Golos off his number one spot, so he got the axe.
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For the Modern format,which recently saw three other powerful cards banned, Wizards of the Coast chose to ban Once Upon A Time. Once Upon is a unique card, because if it’s the first spell a player casts in a game, they may play it for free. The card gives players the ability to " look at the top five cards of [their] library. [They] may reveal a creature or land card from among them and put it into your hand." The ability to do this for free was making some decks far too consistent in the early game, and so it was banned.
Legacy is aMagicformat with one of the highest power levels, because players can play with cards printed at any point inMagic’shistory. Yet the card that’s being banned is actually from the most recentMagicexpansion,Theros Beyond Death. Recently in Legacy a very powerful combo deck emerged. It used which used the newTheroscard Underworld Breach, which allows players to replay cards from their graveyard, and the card Lion Eye Diamond a card players can sacrifice to create mana, to create an infinite loop, generating enough mana to win the game on the spot. This combo was far too powerful, and Underworld Breach met the ban hammer.
Finally, the format that got the most changes is Historic. Historic is a format that only exists onMagic: The Gathering Arena.In historic, players have access to the all of the cards that have been playable inArena’shistory. The cards that were banned today are Oko, Theif of Crowns, Veil of Summer, and the previously discussed Once Upon a Time. It’s worth noting that these cards were already “suspended” meaning they were unplayable but not technically banned, so this is not a huge surprise. What is surprising is that Field Of The Dead has been unbanned. Field is a powerful land card that allows players to create zombies when other land cards enter the battlefield. It was incredibly powerful upon release, warping the meta around it, and was quickly banned from Standard, and then Historic. Perhaps Wizards believe that some of the20 new cards coming to Historicwill be able to answer this powerful card.
This is not the first time that Wizards has had to ban powerful Magic Cards, and it won’t be the last. Some players will always react to dismay to the banning of cards, especially if they play decks that include the banned cards. But banning out broken and powerful cards is an important part of keeping the Meta healthy, and one shudders to imagine a world inwhich some brokenMagic: The Gatheringcards were never banned.
Source:Wizards of the Coast
