Magic: The Gathering Drops Bomb On Competitive Scene With Surprise Bans

Wizards of the Coast has decided to shake up the current competitive meta with a series of surprise bans.

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On Monday, Wizards of the Coast posted their latest revision to the banned and restricted list with quite a few surprise additions. Some of the biggest cards in the current meta in MTG Arena got banned in an attempt to improve play diversity and keep the game from growing stale.

Much of the reasoning behind these bans were due to the fact that COVID-19 is causing players to resort to MTG Arena and Magic Online, two sources where games can be played at a distance but also sources where Wizards of the Coast can see exactly how the competitive meta is shaking out. What they saw is that there were a lot more games being played as a result of social distancing, so the competitive meta is getting stale a lot sooner than they’d expected–too soon to wait for Zendikar Rising to shift the meta on its arrival next month.

So instead, Wizards has taken a knife to cut out some of the problematic cards in the current meta. Those cards include Wilderness Reclamation, Growth Spiral, Teferi, Time Raveler and Cauldron Familiar in Standard; Inverter of Truth, Kethis, the Hidden Hand, Walking Ballista, and Underworld Breach in Pioneer; Wilderness Reclamation and Teferi, Time Raveler in Historic; and Teferi, Time Raveler once again in Brawl.

Teferi Gets Unraveled

The biggest target in the latest ban update is most definitely Teferi, Time Raveler, which has now been removed from pretty much every MTG Arena format available. Although Teferi’s play numbers didn’t quite rise to the point where he was unavoidable, Teferi showed up enough in high-level play that most players couldn’t help but face off against a player rocking Teferi at some point.

And when they did, it just plain sucked. Teferi shuts down a lot of counterplay options and makes games boring and repetitive. Players resoundingly told Wizards of the Coast that it was just unfun to play against Teferi, but they were reluctant to ban him since he seemed to be the only thing keeping ramp decks in check. With Wilderness Reclamation also getting the ban, that barrier was removed so Teferi got the boot.

Ramp Gets Flattened

Wilderness Reclamation, on the other hand, was definitely a card that saw play in quite a few decks. Overall, the card made up 54% of the metagame at the Players Tour Finals, and 15% of the overall Arena metagame for high-level players. Reclamation decks are everywhere, which was enough to get Wizards’ attention.

Wilderness Reclamation allowed mid-range control strategies to become supercharged just as soon as the card hit the table. Players would suddenly have enough mana to drop an enormous Shark Typhoon and then still have a full mana pool available to play counterspells or Magmaquake on their opponent’s turn. Reclamation decks were incredibly strong and incredibly oppressive, but without their titular card, they’ll likely disappear from the competitive scene.

Growth Spiral is another card that saw massive play. A simple common that allows blue/green decks to ramp their mana while maintaining their hands, Growth Spiral could be found in roughly 30% of decks at Mythic ranking on MTG Arena and was a key element in getting our Wilderness Reclamation as soon as possible. Without it, Reclamation and ramp decks are getting a double whammy that they’ll be unlikely to recover from.

Jund Sacrifice Loses Its Familiar

Cauldron Familiar is perhaps the most surprising ban in Standard, but one that makes sense after a moment’s consideration. With Teferi and Reclamation gone, Jund Sacrifice is likely the best deck left in the meta. Jund Sacrifice had a fairly high win rate even with Reclamation around, but with Reclamation, it stood to run rampant over what remained. Taking out the key card of Cauldron Familiar ensures that Jund Sacrifice won’t simply dominate the new meta.

Pioneer is an interesting case for Wizards. In this format, Wizards didn’t note any particular card seeing excessive play, but they did notice that the format was dominated by combo decks. While combos can be fun for a while, their laser-focused strategies that often get boring to both play and play against fairly quickly. For this reason, Wizards noted a stark dropoff in players taking to the Pioneer format in MTG Arena, so they decided that it was best to eliminate the combo meta by banning several key combo cards. The hope is to revive the format ahead of Zendikar Rising’s arrival.

Historic’s bans of Reclamation and Teferi are much the same as Standard’s, so we won’t get into it again. Other than to say Teferi is a powerhouse that should never have been printed.

So, with this recent ban update, the metagame for most of Magic: The Gathering’s competitive scene is suddenly once again wide open. Wizards of the Coast noted that more frequent ban updates might happen in the future if their recent ban wave has the desired effects. We’ll have to wait and see how the numbers play out over the next month.

Source: Wizards of the Coast

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/magic-the-gathering-surprise-bans-august-2020/