Banning & Restricting, again
I am once again stewing in frustrated angst while thinking about Magic the Gathering.
Since the 2024 Standard rotation, saying goodbye to Innistrad and Kamigawa and hello to Bloomburrow (BLB), I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the Standard format. In some ways, Standard has been fantastic. Bloomburrow itself was a lot of fun. Caretaker’s Talent, Rottenmouth Viper, and Fecund Greenshell were powerful new build arounds for niche archetypes that I really enjoyed. New powerful roleplayers like Innkeeper’s Talent and Mockingbird made existing archetypes more fun and diversified play patterns. Unfortunately, BLB also introduced some cards that have proved problematic. The red mouse package (comprised of Emberheart Challenger, Heartfire Hero, and Manifold Mouse) has proven too efficient for standard’s interaction suite and has eaten multiple bans since its introduction. Lumra is currently a lynchpin card in a Pioneer Scapeshift combo deck, and Stormchaser’s Talent is an incredibly powerful card in both blue tempo decks and izzet aggro. Bloomburrow has proven something of a mixed bag for constructed play.
Duskmourne (DSK) was similar, with cards like Overlord of the Hauntwoods, Optimistic Scavenger, and Fear of Missing Out being fun and powerful cards while others like Leyline of Resonance, Nowhere to Run, and Enduring Curiosity leading to less fun play patterns. Most sets since have proven to have a similar mix of playable Standard cards: some fun build arounds and role players, some miserable build arounds and role players, maybe a card worth banning.
All considered, I don’t think this is such a bad thing, but I have been struck at the extremity of this. Prior to BLB, both Outlaws of Thunder Junction (OTJ) and Murders at Karlov Manor (MKM) introduced some powerful new build arounds like Simulacrum Synthesizer and Insidious Roots, but while these sets introduced some cool new archetypes to the format, none of them have proven quite as miserable or quite as ban worthy as those introduced in the post-2024 rotation period.
This has born out in a shocking number of bans. Despite regularly reiterating their struggles to meet player expectation regarding swift action on problematic formats since at least August 2024, Wizards continues to present players with format after format dominated by a shockingly small number of decks and wait entire seasons before banning problematic cards. In response to a March 2025 format dominated by three decks (Mice, Overlords, and Pixie) each of which served to invalidate enormous numbers of would-be tier two or three decks, Jadine Klomparens writes “Standard is flourishing” in their Banned & Restricted announcement. The following B&R would ban a total of seven cards, including key cards from each of these strategies as well as the most powerful cards (or enablers thereof) from Foundations (FDN) and Tarkir Dragonstorm (TDM). Flourishing indeed.
With another rotation behind us, and the longest ban list Standard has had for years, we find ourselves in a similar situation. There is a singular best deck: Vivi Cauldron, a creature combo deck with a strong aggressive plan B abusing the most powerful card from Final Fantasy (FIN) – Vivi Ornetier – and the critical mass of creatures that draw cards to enable Proft’s Eidetic Memory, a then-inconsequential pay off from MKM. The only deck that consistently contests Vivi Cauldron is Mono-Red Aggro, which nonetheless struggles to put up a positive winrate. Below them are Dimir Midrange, which abuses some of the most powerful cards from DSK, and a slew of aggressive decks, combo decks, and control decks, all of which lose to Vivi. It’s a miserable format, and even the most ride-or-die Standard players and content creators have been vocal about the issues.
Today, November 10th, after waiting two months after Wizards admitted that Vivi needed to be banned, we have a new banlist. Wizards has banned three more cards from Standard, bringing the total to ten cards and tying the record for most cards banned in Standard in a given year (previously held by the infamously broken 2020 Standard, with all-timers like Uro and Omnath). Today’s banlist has banned Vivi, Proft’s, and DSK’s Screaming Nemesis. Nemesis is a miserable card, but Mono Red is unlikely to be dominant post-bannings. Don't bother hitting Dimir. Sure.
On one hand, I can understand the argument for banning every card banned this year. If anything, I think there probably ought to be more bans as cards like Kona, Omniscience, and Enduring Curiosity continue to loom over the format. Beneath them are a huge number of cards like Smuggler’s Surprise, Simulacrum Synthesizer, Sephiroth, Leyline of Resonance, Superior Spider-Man, and literally dozens of others that threaten to ruin Standard should these or any future bans open a crack in the format for them to worm their way in to. This is the consequence of printing such an enormous number of cards in to Standard (previously, there were four Standard-legal sets in a year, now six), and trying to serve eternal format – especially Commander – players in sets that are legal in Standard. It’s not tenable, everyone foresaw the issues, but Wizards continues forward unabated.
More than the bans themselves, I’m perturbed by how these bans are being conducted, and some of the choices being made. “Standard is flourishing” has become shorthand for Wizards’ negligence among those who play the format, but it’s not uniquely tone deaf. In September, Carmen Klomparens writes “we want players to have as much confidence as possible in their ability to put a deck together and play it for as long as possible” as justification for their unwillingness to ban Vivi before it ruined a regional qualifier season. Yet, when players turned up to their local qualifiers and were met with empty stores it begs the question of how they’re playing their deck at all.
Today they admitted that Wizards’ Play Design team had overlooked the combo interaction that gives Vivi Cauldron its name, exiling Vivi Ornetier with Agatha’s Soul Cauldron to create enormous amounts of mana, an interaction that I played against myself on FIN’s release date and one that had been discussed in the community since the day Vivi was revealed. Wizards has, at every turn, managed to place their foot firmly into their mouths. Wizards has, at every turn, demonstrated an inability to properly playtest the cards they release – impacting Standard most heavily, though none are safe.
Magic continues to be one of the best games ever made. It is an incredibly achievement that the game functions so well after so many years. It’s still approachable, it’s still fun both casually and competitively, and it's still difficult to find any other game that tickles your brain quite as nicely as Magic does. Unfortunately, every subsequent admission of naivete reads less genuine than the last and it undermines this wonderful game.
I’ve given up on Standard since a couple weeks after the 2025 rotation. The camel’s back has been ground into glue. My format of choice, Pioneer, has been all been shot dead with no plans for official events for the foreseeable future. Today Red Mice, a strong but not outperforming deck in Pioneer had Heartfire Hero banned on grounds of its play rates in Best-of-One, a format that only sees play on Arena and is fully irrelevant for competitive Magic. Their choice to do so demonstrates a categorical failure to understand not only the Pioneer metagame, but also how their own choice to kill Pioneer would impact it – ensuring a lack of players to develop the metagame and pushing players towards the maximally linear strategy for winning online daily events for internet points.
I am frustrated.