As many of you may know, there is an MTG ban announcement scheduled for August 26th. Given the states of various Constructed formats (most notably Modern and Legacy), there will almost certainly be changes coming our way.
That being said, over the last couple of weeks, a multitude of players have been clamoring for early bans. Specifically to both Nadu, Winged Wisdom in Modern and Grief in Legacy. Bant Nadu absolutely dominated Pro Tour MH3. Meanwhile, Dimir Reanimator has been wreaking havoc on Legacy for months and only seems to have gotten better with the printing of Psychic Frog.
For MTG players wishing for emergency bans to take place, unfortunately, it sounds like you are out of luck. In a recent WeeklyMTG stream, Wizards of the Coast employee Blake Rasmussen announced that there were no plans to make changes to tabletop formats before August 26th.
As you might expect, many players are not too happy with this decision. Importantly, though, Blake confirmed that we should expect multiple rebalances to the Boros Energy deck in Historic on August 6, which continues to run rampant on Arena. Still, the overall philosophy about waiting on seemingly inevitable bans has definitely caused frustration.
Wizards’ Ban Philosophy
- Mana Value: 2BB
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Stats: 3/2
- Text: Menace. When Grief enters the battlefield, target opponent reveals their hand. You choose a nonland card from it. That player discards that card. Evoke- Exile a black card from your hand.
In the WeeklyMTG stream, Blake made it pretty clear the reasoning behind the decision to not make any early bans in Modern or Legacy. He mentioned that the goal here is not to surprise players with any unplanned dates for bans. Alongside that point, he stated that Wizards had tried to leave the door open for bans to happen at any time in years prior, and that didn’t work “for a variety of reasons.”
As such, the goal is for players to “have confidence in their testing, in their deck choices, and to have firm, known dates when things can change.” This definitely makes sense to a certain extent. It can be very awkward for a player to buy into a deck with the intention of playing it across multiple events, only for cards in the deck to get banned out of nowhere and their purchases to basically have been rendered useless. Consumer confidence is crucial, and no one would deny that.
What makes this particular ban window extremely awkward is that there really is no surprise factor when it comes to upcoming bans. Players are fully expecting Nadu in Modern and Grief in Legacy to get the axe. By not banning cards off-cycle, players are now forced to wait many weeks before action is taken to improve these formats.
The result is the creation of what players have described as “lame duck formats” that don’t garner as much interest. We’ve already seen events suffer the consequences of player disengagement. Additionally, as Reddit user Imnimo highlights, following a strict schedule when it comes to bans doesn’t work as well when mistakes in development (like Nadu) slip through the cracks. Players aren’t intrigued by the concept of playing vs Bant Nadu or Dimir Reanimator over and over, so there isn’t much of a benefit to waiting on inevitable bans.
Poor Timing for Modern
- Mana Value: 1GU
- Rarity: Rare
- Stats: 3/4
- Text: flying. Creatures you control have “Whenever this creature becomes the target og a spell or ability, reveal the top card of your library. If it’s a land card, put it onto the battlefield. Otherwise, put it into your hand. This ability triggers only twice each turn.”
With this in mind, there’s little incentive for players to purchase a bunch of cards for Modern in the interim. Assuming Nadu will get banned, buying into the deck for only a few weeks is a rough investment. In fact, Nadu has already plummeted in price down to just over $2 according to TCGPlayer market price, since players are bracing themselves for a ban. On the flip side, though, playing something else isn’t exactly appealing when the clear best deck is right in front of your nose.
This will undoubtedly lead to a very weird start to the upcoming Modern RCQ (Regional Championship Qualifier) season. Modern RCQs for season three, round two start on August 3rd. This is a solid three weeks before the MTG ban announcement. There’s a good chance that stores that decide to run RCQs during this period are negatively affected.
Furthermore, assuming Nadu will get banned, players have to wait even longer to start testing in the “new” environment, and prior purchases and testing is largely invalidated. Of course, if Nadu doesn’t get banned, many players are sure to be outraged as well. This creates a lose-lose scenario, which is far from ideal.
Historic Rebalances
- Mana Value: R
- Rarity: Common
- Text: Choose target creature or planeswalker. You get three energy counters, then you may pay any amount of energy. Galvanic Discharge deals that much damage to that permanent.
The one positive aspect of the miniature announcement within the WeeklyMTG stream is that Historic on MTG Arena will be receiving some changes very soon. Historic was arguably in a far worse position than even Modern or Legacy. Since the release of MH3, Energy cards have completely warped the Historic metagame. The recent Arena Championship featured 11 copies of Boros Energy in the top 16, which is absolutely wild.
On August 6th, we should expect multiple rebalances to cards from the Boros Energy deck at minimum. It’ll be interesting to see what cards and how many cards end up getting nerfed. The reality is, that making just one or two Energy cards worse likely won’t be enough to greatly increase format diversity. Seeing major changes to Guide of Souls or Amped Raptor seems highly plausible, given their contributions to explosive starts for the Energy deck. However, part of what makes Boros Energy so strong is the deck’s ability to grind through disruption and efficiently answer opposing threats.
For this reason, I think it’s in Wizards’ best interest to rebalance Galvanic Discharge, Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury, or both. Galvanic Discharge is absurdly efficient, killing even the biggest of creatures. Phlage is an absolute monster that gives Boros Energy incredible staying power. Considering that both of these cards are staples of Jeskai control variants as well which remain extremely strong, it makes sense to take a cautious approach and nerf a multitude of cards. Historic is simply in dire need of drastic changes, and rebalancing only a couple of cards from Boros Energy may not solve the problem long-term.
It’s clearly hard to please everyone, which is why ban decisions are always quite difficult. That being said, it really is unfortunate to see Modern and Legacy continue to stay in Purgatory for this long. For the time being, make sure to mark your calendars and be on the lookout for big format changes on August 6th and August 26th.
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