T’is the Season(al B&R)

What’s good, Spirit Squad!

The December Banned and and Restricted Announcement has come from Wizards of the Coast, and this one is another absolute doozy of an update! To get it out of the way, here’s all of the changes that were actually made:

• Standard: no changes, Standard’s cool
• Pioneer/Explorer: Jegantha, the Wellspring banned
• Modern bans: The One Ring, Amped Raptor, and Jegantha, the Wellspring
• Modern unbans: Splinter Twin, Mox Opal, Faithless Looting, and Green Sun’s Zenith
• Legacy bans: Psychic Frog and Vexing Bauble

Now that we know which cards have been changed, we’ll talk a bit about how each format’s affected by this.

Standard, as I’ve said in multiple articles now (including the last time I got to talk about a Banned and Restricted list update, in our [Too] Good Grief! article), is in an incredibly healthy and fun place. Wizards of the Coast seems to agree with this, so they’re not touching that format at all.

Pioneer only has one change this time around, and it’s one that I can either take or leave. Jegantha was in a good number of Pioneer decks including Jund Sacrifice, Rakdos Transmogrify, Jeskai Ascendancy Combo, and pretty much every true aggro deck in the format. That amount of range is about as close as a card can get to being omnipresent.

The reason Wizards of the Coast gave for wanting Jegantha gone is that, in all of these decks, a lot of top-end cards may as well be illegal for deck space consideration if they have matching color pips in their cost. That’s a lot of cards that cost 4 or more mana. Banning Jegantha “unlocks” all of these cards for deck consideration, and it will probably open a lot of deck building space up to people who like playing with big, flashy cards.

For the same reason, Jegantha’s been banned in Modern as well. Something like 40% of Modern decks included Jegantha as their Companion!

Speaking of which, Modern is easily where the most interesting part of this Banned and Restricted announcement lives.

As a lot of folks have speculated (read: complained about), The One Ring has finally been banned in Modern! For the last year-and-a-half, The One Ring has been easily the best way to generate card advantage in Modern. Decks like Control and Tron got to use it as a relatively low-investment stopgap card against aggro decks, decks like Amulet Titan and the various Eldrazi decks got to use it as a way to gain card advantage after spending cards to accelerate their mana, and decks like Boros Energy got to execute an aggressive early plan and use The One Ring to be good in the late game as well. A lot like Jegantha in Pioneer, this is too much range for one card to have in a format.

Finally, we come to Amped Raptor. I did briefly mention the Boros Energy deck, which is the embodiment of “Good Early, Good Late”. It got to play very good aggressive cards like Ocelot Pride and Guide of Souls (along with Amped Raptor), good midrange cards like Blood Moon and Static Prison, and great endgame cards like Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury and The One Ring. When you include the Mardu and Jeskai versions of the Energy archetype, the deck ended up being about 36% of the Modern metagame!

Potentially more interesting than the Modern bans are the Modern unbans! This is the biggest wave of unbans we’ve seen in at least five years, and I’m here for it.

Splinter Twin is legal for the first time in like a decade! A huge fan favorite of a deck, Splinter Twin is an Izzet combo deck that plays its signature card with either Pestermite or Deceiver Exarch to attack for infinite damage as early as Turn 4. Before the days of cards like Force of Negation, Subtlety, or Solitude this interaction was an absolute nightmare to deal with. Now that we have more free interaction than in 2016, I think this deck will be pretty good but not oppressive.

Green Sun’s Zenith is the other “tame” unbanning we have. Back in 2011, getting a Turn-1 Dryad Arbor out of your library was an incredibly powerful thing to do (it still is), but other than that Green-based decks like Elves haven’t really mattered in Modern. I think this change will both make people who love Elves VERY happy, and it’ll allow for random decks like Fiend Artisan combo to explore some deck building space.

Now into the scary places

Mox Opal is one of the most powerful cards that has even been Modern-legal. Period. Decks like Krark-Clan Ironworks combo, Affinity, and Grinding Station have all made absolutely absurd use of what’s effectively a piece of Power. Ironworks as a deck isn’t a thing anymore, but Affinity and Grinding Station decks will absolutely adjust to make use of much faster mana. The REAL winner here is Hardened Scales players. Anyone who puts the time into that deck with a level-up like what Mox Opal provides is going to be a terrifying opponent in the months to come. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Finally, we come to Faithless Looting. I am straight-up telling everyone who reads this now: if you don’t have at least 3 cards in your sideboard to specifically deal with Graveyard decks, you are in for a terrible time over the next few months. Dredge is straight-up going to be a Tier-1 deck at some point before the new year begins. We also have each of Arclight Phoenix, Vengevine, Hollow One, Persist, and Underworld Breach to consider. Any one of those cards could break out into Tier 1 as soon as tomorrow, due to the absurd power level of Faithless Looting.

Let’s move to Legacy. 

Psychic Frog is a card that players have wanted banned for at least half of 2024, due to the power level of both Dimir Tempo and Dimir Reanimator decks. Grief caught a ban for the same reason, but that wasn’t even close to enough to stop Dimir from being the best color combination in the format. For scale: until the printing of Psychic Frog, Izzet Delver variants were the best decks in Legacy for probably 11 of the last 12 years, and after Psychic Frog they straight-up don’t exist. It’ll be nice to “only” have to deal with Dragon’s Rage Channeler and Delver of Secrets again.

Vexing Bauble also caught the axe, and if I’m being honest it’s about time. Bauble’s already restricted in Vintage for a lot of the same reason it’s banned in Legacy: free countermagic like Force of Will, Force of Negation, and Daze are important. Bauble not only negates their existence, it’s also one of the most hilariously low-investment cards that’s ever been printed. Costing 1 means you get to search for it with Urza’s Saga, it’s playable in just about anything that isn’t Manaless Dredge, and it even cycles itself in matchups you don’t care about its effect. At the Legacy Eternal Weekend tournament this year, four of the Top 8 decks were Urza’s Saga + Vexing Bauble combo decks! Players will not miss this card.

Whew. That’s it! One seriously large update to the Banned and Restricted list, and if you’re a fan of Modern you have a LOT of work to do in the next few weeks. Personally, I find a shakeup of this magnitude to be a Christmas gift from Wizards of the Coast, as there will be a lot of brewing and chatter going on in the various Magic: the Gathering content spaces. Hopefully I see some of you finding success because of these changes, and I’ll see y’all on the next one!