Yesterday saw the latest Magic: The Gathering Banned and Restricted announcement. This impacted several formats with bans and even a few unbans. Some of these changes were no-brainers for most players, while others came as somewhat of a shock. Today I'm going to talk about all of them, and since there's plenty to talk about, I'm not going to waste any time and will just get right to it!

Modern

Let's start off with the most obvious one: Modern!

This is the one everyone saw coming a mile away. If you've been paying any attention to the Modern format lately, it's been clear that the Grinding Station/Underworld Breach combo deck was one of the best Modern decks ever. Some statistics from Regional Championships had its win rate as high as 60% - an absurd number that easily signaled to everyone that something was getting banned from the deck. While the recent unbanning of Mox Opal pushed this deck over the edge, it was clear that in this case they should hit the more impactful card. Thus, Underworld Breach leaves Modern and cements it as arguably one of the most powerful cards of all time.

Legacy

Next up are two bans for the Legacy format.

The first of these two is Sowing Mycospawn. This powerful Eldrazi creature allowed players to simultaneously ramp and blow up opponents' lands, shutting them down while advancing you further. Thanks to the ability to find lands like Wasteland, Karakas, and Blast Zone, this could cripple opponents even harder in a way that made it hard for players to enjoy a typical game of Legacy. To help power down the Eldrazi deck, Sowing Mycospawn was banned, though several format pundits had hoped Kozilek's Command might've gone instead.

Reanimator has been a staple of the Legacy format for a long time. Over the past year, the deck has reached astronomically high showings in events to the point that action has been taken against it several times. First, Grief was banned in August of last year, then Psychic Frog in December, and now Troll of Khazad-Dum. This creature allowed you to cycle a creature to ensure you found your second land while simultaneously providing you with a massive and hard to deal with creature in the event you couldn't find something bigger like Archon of Cruelty or Atraxa, Grand Unifier. Many players hoped Entomb or Reanimate would be banned instead, so it'll be interesting to see if this one does enough for the format in the long term.

Pauper

Now we get into my neck of the woods! Pauper saw significant changes with this Banned and Restricted announcement. As a member of the Pauper Format Panel that largely oversees these changes, I've got a good bit of insight into these.

Let's start off with the major one. Basking Broodscale is part of a combo deck that uses the card in tandem with Sadistic Glee to create an infinite loop. Adapting the Broodscale puts a +1/+1 counter on it, which makes a token that you immediately sacrifice, put another counter on Broodscale via Glee, which then makes another creature, and so on. This can provide infinite mana, infinite +1/+1 counters, infinite life (with Sylvok Lifestaff), and even potential loops with Evolution Sage if that also has Sadistic Glee on it.

This creates a sort of Splinter Twin-esque combo that's difficult to interact with and kills people out of nowhere. It's not impossible to win the game on turn three on the play where an opponent has only taken two turns. The necessity for removal and interaction to combat this created a warping impact and - to be frank - just wasn't very fun to play against. These problematic play patterns were the core crux of this ban, and so it exits the format.

Going with it was Deadly Dispute. This powerful draw two spell was innocuous when it was just Costly Plunder. However, when you staple a treasure token to it - effectively providing a mana rebate to it - it becomes far more powerful. When combined with an Ichor Wellspring already on the battlefield, it effectively provides an Ancestral Recall by giving you back one of the two mana you paid for it as well as the third card from the Wellspring. With redundancy on both sides of this combination, it was hard to decide what to break up, but the treasure was deemed so important that it was worth cutting out Dispute to try powering down the interaction without fully removing it.

Kuldotha Rebirth might seem like an odd choice. The deck has just been doing fine lately with win rates that read well on the surface, but tell a larger tale when you dive deeper. This is because the Kuldotha Red decks had a 60-70% win rate in Game 1 against almost every deck in the format. That win rate dropped significantly in post board situations, indicating large polarity or heavy differences in scale. As an example, an ideal matchup might be closer to 55% favored Game 1 and then change to 45% Game 2.

The reason this is such a problem is that it indicates people are required to sideboard heavily to combat it. Looking at it from this angle suggests that the deck is format-warping in a way where you have to throw your all at it or just lose. Couple this intense play with the fact that the deck was just everywhere - far and away the most played deck - in Magic Online leagues and it creates a frustrating experience players were sick of. Thus, the card was banned.

In addition to bans, though, there were also two additional unbans. These unbans are considered "trial unbans" where they'll be re-examined on the next scheduled Banned and Restricted Announcement on June 30th and determine if they stay unbanned or go back onto the ban list.

The first of these unbans was Prophetic Prism. This card was originally banned due to how easily it gave Flicker Tron decks access to all colors of mana and how powerful it was in conjunction with the deck's namesake Ghostly Flicker. As time has gone on, however, the format has sped up considerably and - despite the addition of the comparable Energy Refractor - the deck has still been struggling. As such, the PFP decided to try unbanning this card to give it some more juice in the current metagame with the hope that it doesn't prove too dominant.

Prophetic Prism looks rather tame if you're not really in the know about the format. It's also very uninteresting, as it's more of a nuts and bolts kind of card. The other unban here, however, is a far more exciting one!

High Tide is a powerful mana acceleration spell well known for doing crazy combo shenanigans in formats like Legacy, Commander, Cube, and - in the distant past - Extended. Given this history, as well as select paper Pauper events before legality was formalized for paper play, High Tide was banned outright when the format was unified in 2019. After some internal deck-building, testing, and discussion, the Panel felt the card had a good shot at being a reasonable addition to the format, and so it's being tested out with an unban.

Given the history of High Tide, this unban has many players excited to see what they can do with the card. It's also proven to be a source of trepidation for some. The next few weeks will be interesting to see how the card impacts the format and what cool lists come out as a result. You may even see a more in-depth discussion next week from me on this very topic!

Finally, the major formats of Standard, Pioneer, and Vintage all saw no changes. If you'd like the full details on all these changes - or lack thereof in the case of the three aforementioned formats - you can check out the official Banned and Restricted Announcement via Wizards. For Pauper, you can also read the Explanation of Pauper Bans article or else watch Gavin's accompanying video (both feature the same content).

Paige Smith

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