No Ban Hammer? Now What?

What’s good, Spirit Squad! Today we’re going to talk about the Banned & Restricted (B&R) list and its most recent update… or lack thereof. 👀

See, Modern Horizons 3 has dropped and we even got to see the best players in the world compete in a Modern Pro Tour this past weekend. This is absolutely the place where we’d be most likely to see some bans or unbans shake up a format, force players to reevaluate the various competitive formats, and bring some new deck lists to events.

But What Happens When There Is No Change to the B&R List?

In most scenarios, no news is good news. Doctor doesn’t call you? Perfect. Kid’s school never has to send a letter home? Awesome. But this is Magic: the Gathering. We have competitive formats to balance, and no news almost always translates to “no improvement” when things aren’t so balanced.

This isn’t to say that there is an expectation of perfect balance, ever. There’s always going to be a “best deck” or a group of strong decks. Modern Horizons 3 gave us some tools that are hilariously strong, even by Modern’s standards. Three especially strong cards from Modern Horizons 3 have made so much impact that they’ve been the subject of most ban-related conversations less than a month into the set’s release:

• Nadu, Winged Wisdom
• Necrodominance
• Ruby Medallion / Ral, Monsoon Mage

Nadu, Winged Wisdom is a card we’ve already talked about at-length in our Nadu Kid on the Block article, but that was written before Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3. Now that we have a high-stakes tournament under our belt, we now know that the hype behind Nadu was absolutely justified. It might be even better than we’d thought at first. Nadu decks took up about 25% of the Day 1 metagame at the Pro Tour, 5 of the Top 8 spots, and the eventual 1st place finish in the hands of Simon Nielsen! Very powerful stuff, and there’s already a lot of conversation/outcry in favor of a ban.

Necrodominance is a card that I certainly wouldn’t describe as being fair, but in the context of Modern I somehow think it’s in a good place. It’s powerful enough to inspire or improve multiple archetypes, but (as of the time of this writing) not powerful enough to just make everyone miserable. The two most popular shells for Necrodominance right now seem to be Rakdos Scam, a deck that’s been very good for the past couple of years and has even gotten Fury banned from Modern, and Mono-Black Coffers, a control deck that was already good with The One Ring but very much appreciates a second very good card advantage engine.

Finally, we got two cards that help bring an old Legacy Combo deck to Modern! Both Ruby Medallion and Ral, Monsoon Mage lower the cost of your Red spells like Desperate Ritual and Pyretic Ritual, giving the Bryant Cooks of the world some very real deck building space for a deck like Ruby Storm to be a key part of the Modern metagame. This deck can win as early as Turn 2 with some degree of consistency, and as a result it’s the most popular deck in all of Modern right now!

That’s a lot of powerful stuff. How is all of that allowed?

This ain’t the Modern your mom and dad grew up with.

(Chandra’s mom and dad used to be Modern staples!)

Long gone are the days where Pia and Kiran Nalaar is a playable top-of-the-curve card. Goblin Dark-Dwellers has probably not seen the inside of a sleeve since the pre-COVID days. To compete in Modern in 2024, your deck needs to have some serious firepower.

Free interaction (Solitude, Flare of Denial, and everyone’s favorite… Grief), a one-card way to draw >10 cards (The One Ring, Necrodominance), a combo that can happen on Turn 2 (Ruby Storm, Amulet Titan), or even ways to completely stop your opponent from playing the game (Blood Moon, Harbinger of the Seas) on Turn 3 should all be on the list of things you expect to run into at your average Modern tournament. With that said:

Hol’ up, so Modern is gonna have some really strong stuff. What IS getting banned next?

The real, honest answer is that none of us have any idea what Wizards of the Coast is going to choose to ban, unban, or leave alone in the future. But here are my three speculations on what SHOULD get banned in each of the relevant non-rotating formats:

• In Pioneer, Explore combo feat. Amalia Benavides Aguirre is easily the best deck at the moment. Recent events have seen the deck average a 56% win rate across the format, and Amalia has effectively kicked aggro decks out of the format. You *can* play decks like Gruul Sagas and Mono-White Humans, but I would never recommend taking those to a large event while Amalia exists. In fact, the only two decks in all of Pioneer Amalia has a losing record against are the Azorius decks: Control and Spirits.
• In Modern, we saw just how strong Nadu, Winged Widsom is as a Magic card. We spoke about that previously in this article and in the Nadu-specific article, but I can’t say I believe banning Shuko will be enough to make Nadu’s power level line up with the rest of Modern. Nadu itself should probably just leave the format.
• In Legacy, we have all kinds of strong cards that can make the right opponent miserable. Chalice of the Void, Trinisphere, Daze, and Wasteland all do extremely dirty things. But Grief has long been Public Enemy #1. The Dimir Re-Scaminator deck that gets to play each of Orcish Bowmasters (even if that’s been on the decline), Psychic Frog, Entomb, Reanimate, Grief, AND Force of Will in the same deck has been running things for months. When Modern Horizons 2 came out two years ago, everyone and their mom was worried about Grief being too powerful of a card, and the current state of Legacy shows just how right everyone was to be afraid.

I know that I, for one, will be happy to keep my eyes open and see what happens in the next B&R update. For now, I’ll enjoy playing my slightly broken Merfolk cards and hoping that Nadu does find its way out of Modern. Until then, I’ll see y’all on the next one!