Today’s ban announcement will surely go down in modern MTG history. In addition to hitting just about every problem card players wanted to see hit in Modern and Legacy, it also unbanned a number of old favorites, too. It’s no exaggeration to say that Modern is essentially a brand-new format after these changes. A big part of this is the Jegantha, the Wellspring ban.
This wasn’t the most called-for ban coming into this announcement, but it’s still very much welcome. It now joins the substantial list of Companion cards that have been banned in one format or another. Looking back on the mechanic in the fresh light of this ban, it’s hard to see it as anything other than an egregious design mistake on Wizards’ part.
Jegantha, The Wellspring Bites The Ban Bullet
- Mana Value: 4G/R
- Rarity: Rare
- Type: Legendary Creature – Elemental Elk
- Stats: 5/5
- Card Text: Companion — No card in your starting deck has more than one of the same mana symbol in its mana cost. (If this card is your chosen companion, you may put it into your hand from outside the game for 3 as a sorcery.) Tap: Add WUBRG. This mana can’t be spent to pay generic mana costs.
First, let’s look at the Jegantha, the Wellspring ban itself. As of today, the card is now banned in three different formats: Modern, Pioneer, and Explorer. For those who play a lot of Pioneer and Modern, this shouldn’t come as a surprise at all. Jegantha has been showing up in a huge range of lists in both formats recently. In fact, according to MTG Goldfish data, the card is in 37% of Modern decks and 21% of Pioneer decks.
On the surface, this doesn’t look right at all. As a creature, Jegantha is pretty mediocre. Five mana 5/5s don’t get as much mileage now as they used to, after all. That said, because the card is a Companion, this doesn’t really matter. Jegantha’s restriction is so easy to meet that many decks are including it simply because they can. In the ban announcement article, Wizards justified the ban as follows:
“The value of having access to an extra card in games where resources are tight means most decks that can play Jegantha do, regardless of how it fits into their strategy. This homogenizes the cards that these decks play, with top-end cards in particular suffering. It is hard to justify playing a personal favorite card or a metagame-specific call if it means giving up Jegantha.”
Wizards of the Coast
The above was mentioned in regards to Pioneer specifically. Wizards later mentioned that the same reasoning applies to Modern, noting that “Ultimately, the decision to avoid cards that have more than one of the same mana symbol isn’t a very interesting or fun one to make.”
This makes the Jegantha ban fairly unique among those announced today. It’s not that the card is necessarily too powerful, but that it has a ripple effect at the deckbuilding stage that makes the formats it’s a part of less interesting as a result. With Jegantha gone, we should hopefully see more powerful double-pip cards creep back into contention in both Modern and Pioneer.
Another Companion Casualty
For fans of the Companion mechanic, the Jegantha, the Wellspring ban marks another heavy blow. Jegantha is the fifth of the 10 Companion creatures to receive a ban, which is hardly a glowing endorsement of its design value.
Lurrus is by far the most prolific example. Banned in Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, and Explorer, this Nightmare Cat became the unwilling poster boy for Companion. It was even banned in Vintage for just under a year, such was its raw power. There were a few factors behind this, chief among them being Lurrus’ low cost and its easy restriction. Decks in older formats don’t play many expensive cards, meaning it was easy to cut down to only two or less to accommodate Lurrus.
None of the other Companions really come close to Lurrus in notoriety, but a few others have caught bans over the years as well. Lutri has been banned in Commander since launch since it’s a free addition to any red/blue deck, while Yorion was banned in Modern due to its power level and the physical issues around constantly shuffling large decks. Zirda, the Dawnbreaker was also banned in Legacy, due to its interactions with mana rocks like Grim Monolith.
In every case, consistency was the core issue. As creatures Companions are all perfectly acceptable designs, but having them on tap completely changes the dynamic. The fact that the mechanic received a pretty heavy errata, demanding an extra three mana to add your Companion to your hand in a game, and five of them still had to get banned is pretty damning. Since only 10 Companion cards exist in total, this means that 50% of the mechanic has been banned somewhere or another. Even the likes of Storm and Dredge can’t claim that.
A Complete Design Failure?
In his latest Storm Scale update, Mark Rosewater gave the Companion mechanic a nine. This makes it very nearly as bad as mechanics get by the Head Designer’s standards. In the article, Rosewater even states that it should likely be even higher on the scale.
“I should probably give companion a 10. It’s unpopular, has little design space, and is hard to balance, but it’s a mechanic that I get asked about a lot (I believe the ratings don’t totally reflect the public’s interest), and I’d like to believe if the perfect opportunity arose, we’d at least think about it.”
Mark Rosewater
All of this tracks neatly with the huge number of bans the mechanic has seen. Cards that homogenize formats are often quick to receive bans, and so far half of the Companions have done so at some point. They also reduce the variance in a given game, which is fine for singleton formats like Commander but much more of an issue in 60-card constructed.
At this point, the whole mechanic feels like a failed experiment. Half of its cards have seen bans, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more follow suit. Only the super-niche Companions like Umori feel in any way balanced. That said, Rosewater’s line above about potentially bringing it back does raise some interesting questions. Is it possible for a new suite of designs to fulfill the mechanic’s original potential?
Honestly, I’m not sure. The big problem with Companion, its consistency, is baked into the mechanic itself. As we’ve seen, even a deeply mediocre Companion can warp formats just by existing. The allure of an extra card in your starting hand is simply that strong. This is a tough problem to fix, too. Making the Companion conditions stricter seems like an obvious move, but it’s easy to make a card completely unplayable this way.
Overall I think the Companion mechanic was a mistake from the start, and today’s ban is just one more piece of evidence proving that. I pray for us all if Wizards ever really does bring it back.
