Surprise! Wizards of the Coast just dropped a big Banned and Restricted Announcement today, and I can promise you that it’s spicy! Let’s not waste any time, and get right into it
The Hammer
Pioneer:
- Lurrus of the Dream Den is Banned
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Modern:
- Lurrus of the Dream Den is Banned
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Pauper:
- Galvanic Relay is Banned
- Disciple of the Vault is Banned
- Expedition Map is Unbanned
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Tabletop and Magic Online Effective Date: March 7, 2022.
Letting the Cat Out of the Bag
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So the big deal here is that Lurrus of the Dream Den is being banned in both Modern and Pioneer. For Modern, Lurrus has become a very controversial card. It’s one that the community either loves or hates, and both sides are very vocal about it.
From WotC‘s data, Lurrus was a big contributing factor in the homogenization of play and deck building. As Modern continues to age, the overall strategy of the format tends to favor cheap and efficient spells. Lurrus compounds on that and didn’t pose enough of a drawback to play him for the rate at which he is played.
What’s more, Pioneer is in a place where Lurrus does see a fair bit of play, not as much as Modern, but a fair bit. In a similar vein, as Pioneer ages and the card pool expands, it’s possible that we see the overall meta strategy move towards that of Modern. Thusly, Lurrus is getting banned sooner, rather than later.
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Pauper Changes
Pauper is a very interesting place, and the changes here were enough that Gavin Verhey had to do a completely separate article to detail everything.
The long and short of it here is that when Chatterstorm was banned, Storm fell out a little bit. But with the printing of Experimental Synthesizer, Rakdos Storm has risen immensely in power, and thus Galvanic Relay is banned.
For the Disciple of the Vault decks, the Atog banning was a big blow, but the deck was very resilient. Players found new ways to abuse this card and the deck still had high win rates overall. With one of it’s bad match ups, Storm, being hit in this B&R, combined with the negative play patterns and high win rate, Disciple also gets the axe.
Lastly, we have an unban of Expedition Map. When Prophetic Prism and Bonder’s Ornament got banned back in January, Tron took a pretty big power hit. It fell back in line with the rest of the format, but players were no longer incentivized to play it.
The Pauper Format Panel felt that they did like the power that Tron was at, but definitely want to see the deck be played as well. They decided to unban Map because when it was banned, the impact was minimal. So unbanning it shouldn’t throw anything out of whack, but should give players who like the deck a little more to work with.
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Overall, a very cool announcement! What’s exciting for me is to see how the Modern Metagame shifts around no longer having access to Lurrus. Make sure to check out the full announcement for more details. What are your thoughts on this? Are you happy with these changes? Let us know!
