The MTG community has a strange relationship with bans. These days it feels like players call for a new ban every single week. When big bans actually happen, however, there’s often huge backlash, as we saw firsthand this week. It’s a bit of a no-win situation for Wizards. Despite the ongoing controversy following Commander bans, many MTG players are already requesting more. This time, players are requesting cards be banned in MTG Standard, specifically Leyline of Resonance.
Capable of facilitating a blistering turn-two kill, this card can be incredibly difficult to play against. Due to this, many players are already hoping it gets banned, even though Duskmourn: House of Horror technically only released today.
The Problem With Leyline Of Resonance
- Mana Value: 2RR
- Rarity: Rare
- Card Text: If Leyline of Resonance is in your opening hand, you may begin the game with it on the battlefield. Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell that targets only a single creature you control, copy that spell. You may choose new targets for the copy.
To explain the community concern, we first need to explain the Leyline of Resonance combo. If you get a Leyline out on turn zero via the effect, then open with either Cacophony Scamp or Heartfire Hero, you can win the game the following turn. To do this, all you need to do is cast Turn Inside Out, attack, then cast Brun Together.
With this line of play, your creature will deal 7-8 damage for its attack, 7-8 from Burn Together, then 7-8 from its dies trigger. The result? 21-24 total damage: enough to immediately kill an opponent on turn two. That’s a fast kill even by Modern standards, so to see it in Standard is pretty remarkable. While the sequence above sounds a bit Magical Christmas Land, there’s actually a lot of redundancy available in the combo pieces it uses.
Assuming you hit a turn zero Leyline, you have two options for one drops as discussed above. You then have multiple options for pump spells too, with Monstrous Rage being a viable substitute for Turn Inside Out. It’s worth noting that if you end up with a combination of Scamp and Rage, you’ll only be able to deal 18 damage in total. It shouldn’t be too hard to push your opponent over the edge at that point, however.
There are other possible combo lines too, involving multiple Leylines, but the bottom line is that this is a deck that can kill extremely early in a format that’s not really prepared for it.
Will It Need A Ban?
The Leyline of Resonance combo seems very strong in MTG Standard so far. Naturally it’s seeing a lot of play on Arena, since new combos are exciting. It’s also a relatively cheap deck to craft Wildcard-wise. As a result the best-of-one ladder is flooded with Leyline combo decks already, and players are not amused.
“The nature of Bo1 does not allow for this card to exist untouched yet still remain a healthy environment for other decks simple as.”
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Best-of-one as a format is innately vulnerable to fast decks, be they Aggro or Combo. These kinds of decks can typically catch you unawares in game one, before you’ve had a chance to load up your silver bullets from the sideboard. In best-of-one, where this isn’t an option, they can be incredibly frustrating to lose to.
It’s definitely too early to say whether the Leyline combo deck is a problem or not. That said, there is precedent for bans like this taking place. Back in 2019, Nexus of Fate was banned from best-of-one formats on Arena. The reasoning given was that the card created extremely drawn-out and unfun games, which took a very long time to end. The opposite of what Leyline enables, effectively. The deck wasn’t banned for being too powerful, but rather because it led to bad play experiences, especially on the Arena platform.
There are a lot of parallels between the Nexus of Fate situation and the Leyline one. Both seem to be causing problems in best-of-one specifically, and both lead to unfun games for their opponents. Based on this comparison, it’s very possible that Leyline could see a ban soon. On the other hand, there has only been one best-of-one ban since Arena launched in 2018. I really don’t see Leyline getting banned in best-of-three, either, since there are plenty of ways to fight it there.
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