With another Banned & Restricted announcement in the books, Timeless players (there are dozens of us!) were once again left wondering what it will take to get WotC to do something to improve the format. Granted, Timeless is not the most popular format, but with access to every card on Arena, it's a crying shame that so few of them are viable. So here five cards whose exit would go some way towards making the format more enjoyable.

Show And Tell

All right, look, you can build your deck to beat this. Some of my favourite decks in the format's earliest days crush this deck with discard and counter magic. But if you run into it in best-of-one, and you're not playing a control, or if you just don't draw the disruption you need, it feels like a complete non-game. They put Omniscience into play on turn two or three and the game is over. Maybe this one is on me for not playing best-of-three exclusively, but Show And Tell leads to some of the least interesting, least fun games of Magic it's possible to have and the format would be better if it was no longer an option.

Goblin Charbelcher

See above, except this deck is capable of winning on turn one with the right draw. All of the same caveats apply: you can build a deck (or at least a sideboard) to make Charbelcher a joke, but if you're playing best-of-one the joke is on you. Again, in an ideal world, we're all playing best-of-three and don't have to worry so much about this nonsense, but since the majority of arena players do not play BO3, I think making the BO1 queue more tolerable is a reasonable goal. Besides, this deck can win before its opponent gets to play a land, so even the BO3 argument doesn't necessarily hold up.

Amped Raptor

If it's too good for modern, it's maybe too good for Timeless... I don't know how convincing an argument that is, but I do know that Energy as a whole is too good for Timeless. All the cards are good, but Raptor might be the outlier, as it allows for some ridiculous turns. turn two Raptor into Ajani makes me want to concede on the spot. Even if they don't manage that, the deck has absurd reach with Goblin Bombardment and can even play a control game if it needs to, thanks to one one-mana Oblivion Ring. It even gets to have game against combo decks, thanks to Juggernaut Peddler. Yeah, every card in this deck slots into an oppressive whole, but WotC seems to have correctly singled out Raptor in Modern. The deck isn't dead there, but it is a much smaller part of the meta-game. That's all I'm asking for.

Psychic Frog

I had to re-write this section because I ended up ranting a little bit about the design of this card. It's com-pletely egregious. Anyway, Dimir tempo decks aren't necessarily dominating the format, but that's not the fault of this little guy, who does way, way too many things to be printed on a single card. Still, even if he's not crushing the Arena ladder, he is doing very well in third party tournaments and it's easy to see why. You don't really need to play any other threats: if you can protect the frog with counter magic and removal, it will win the game on its own. The fact that it helps to protect itself by drawing you more cards every turn makes it feel less like a frog and more like an unstoppable freight train. Funnily enough, the frog is the best argument against printing free counter Magic into Timeless: can you imagine facing this card on turn two, having the removal you need, and still not being able to deal with it anyway? Yuck.

The Nuclear Option: Dark Ritual

I've written a lot already about non-games, but I've been burying the lead a little bit. What all of the combo decks have in common, the good ones and the bad, is Dark Ritual. It even powers tourna-ment-winning deck, Beseech Storm, and we know from dec-ades of Magic that everyone loves playing against storm decks. I don't think any other single ban would shake up the format more than losing Dark Ritual, but there is a problem. If you ban Dark Ritual but don't ban something from the Energy deck, the format probably becomes even less diverse. The meme in the Timeless community nowadays is that is a Peddler vs Combo format, and removing Dark Ritual essentially reduces two viable artchetypes down to one. Maybe that means decks that prey on energy can fill the void, but the mechanic as a whole is so resilient to hate that I don't know if that would be enough to improve the health of the format. It likely kills Charbelch-er/Ballustrade Spy decks, though, which is definitely a good thing. Even a restriction would improve matters, vastly reducing the amount of turn one kills available, which can only be a good thing.