Banned & Restricted Announcement – Monday, 8/26/2019

Every so often, Wizards looks at the banned list for each format and decides what needs to happen to make the format healthier or if it’s okay the way it is. Today though, Wizards dumped on us the biggest overhaul of an update I have personally seen in my time playing Magic to date. Some of these changes, I’m very happy to see. Others, I agree with them, but I’m sad to see them happen. Before we get started, remember to check us out on Twitter @MTGOracle and follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, and YouTube! My name is Blue, let’s jump in.

First, let’s start with Vintage. This one will be short and sweet since I don’t play vintage, so I’ll just paraphrase Wizards’ reasons for the changes.

Wizards stated earlier that Shops is already a deck too powerful for the format as it is. With cards like Karn, the Great Creator and Mystic Forge, WorkShops is even better with the card advantage provided by Mystic Forge and the static ability of Karn shutting down most of what makes vintage special, on top of being able to tutor for silver bullets like Time Vault, Voltaic Key, and the other powerful cards that help the deck win, they restricted them to keep the deck in check of the rest of the format. They also said that Mental Misstep causes the problem where everyone is playing four copies of Misstep to be able to fight their opponents’ Missteps and it’s this vicious cycle that even if you don’t care about it, you play it to stop your opponent. I believe this is the same reasoning for why it was banned in Modern and Legacy as well, so good job on Wizards for staying consistent, I guess. Additionally, Golgari Grave-Troll was restricted for facilitating graveyard strategies too easily. Finally, Fastbond is unrestricted for what Wizards basically said to be player request. The Vintage community suggested Fastbond be unrestricted because they’d like to brew with four copies of the card and see what they can come up with. Since vintage is a mostly artifact-based format with few lands, a Fastbond deck would, in theory, look very different from the rest of the current meta. Additionally, Wizards will be looking at the restricted list again later to see if anything else is worth the same treatment as Fastbond, including two cards mentioned by name, Windfall and Necropotence.

Now on to standard. This will be super easy since it’s just one card, and I don’t really have much to say about it.

Rampaging Ferocidon‘s History in standard is quite funny in my opinion. Printed in Ixalan and banned nearly immediately, its time in standard was short lived, only being around from September 2017 to January 2018. It’s original purpose was to fight the Copy Cat combo dominating the format when first printed, but after Felidar Guardian was given an emergency banning, Ferocidon became a liability rather than a safety valve. Rakdos aggro/midrange was growing in popularity and other decks and strategies were becoming unplayable, like the token decks around at the time. The red dino turning off life gain was making it impossible to combat the strategy in any realistic way. Funny enough, with Scapeshift being the top deck and only having a couple ways to fight it, Wizards has unbanned Ferocidon for what seems to be the same reason they banned it in the first place. Sadly, the dino only gets to enjoy freedom for a couple weeks before rotating out of standard and entering the realm of unplayable cards in eternal formats.

Finally, we get to modern. There’s not a lot to discuss here, since all three of these changes have been anticipated for a while and pretty much everyone expected them at some point.

The Boogeyman is gone! Hogaak is banned and I couldn’t be happier, but that happiness is weakened by Faithless Looting joining the trampling 8/8. Of the three cards discussed most often to get the axe, I personally thought Looting was the safest. Though it facilitated some unfair strategies, it also aided some legitimately fair decks, like Mardu Pyromancer and Hollow One. The other two, Ancient Stirrings and Mox Opal, are almost exclusively in unfair decks like Tron and Urza combo respectively. Either way, I’m sure the format will find some way to replace looting in the fair strategies, but it seems many of the unfair ones will have a hard time without it. I’ve heard many speculating Izzet phoenix is no more. As for Stoneforge Mystic getting unbanned, this I’m excited for. I’ve personally thought it was safe for a long time, but especially in the wake of an unfair meta. In a world where dredge can have three Prized Amalgum‘s and two Blood Ghast‘s on turn two or three, a turn three Batterskull is nothing. I’m glad Wizard’s saw this and finally made the change. I don’t plan on building a Stone-Blade deck, but I do think it’ll be healthy for the format.

So that wraps up my thoughts on the Banned & Restricted update. What do you guys think? Should Looting have been left alone? Is Ferocidon too good to have around in standard? Do you think Fastbond is a bit much in Vintage? Either way, I’m sure Wizards will make adjustments accordingly in the future if anything seems too good with today’s changes. Don’t forget that we are partnered with TCGPlayer! Click the link and any purchases made from that visit go to help support us! As always, check us out on Twitter @MTGOracle and me @TwoBlueUntapped to keep up with everything Magic. This is Blue, Signing out!