(Too) Good Grief!

What’s good, Spirit Squad!

Today we get to celebrate the recent changes to the Banned and Restricted (B&R) list in all of the non-rotating formats! Pretty much everyone predicted that Public Enemy #1, Grief, would get the boot in at least one format, but this update has a LOT of ground to cover!

First, here’s the entire list of changes that we’ll be talking about today:

First, let’s shout out Standard real quick. As discussed in our Bloom! There it is! article, Standard is in a pretty fun, healthy place. Wizards of the Coast not changing anything about just Standard only reinforces that point. That’s it. No notes. I love where Standard is, at the moment.

Next, we’ll cover my favorite format, Pioneer!

By “favorite”, you just mean “the one format Spirits is good in” huh?

Fine. You got me.

But on a serious note, the banning of both Amalia Benavides Aguirre and Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord means a few things for the Pioneer format as a whole:

• Rakdos Vampires was about 30% of the Pioneer format in the last month! Since most of the non-Vampires cards in Rakdos colors are still very much on-rate, expect people to still be using those cards. Rakdos Midrange, Rakdos Sacrifice, and even Rakdos Transmogrify will be a good percentage of the Pioneer meta in the next few weeks while players financially adjust.
• Amalia Combo and, to a smaller extent, Rakdos Vampires kicked aggro almost completely out of Pioneer by just being decks that gained life while enacting their “Plan A”. Both of these decks leaving Pioneer at the same time means that we should expect a large influx of decks like Izzet Ensoul, Gruul Sagas, Mono-White Humans, and Mono-Red/Gruul Prowess.
• As for the rest of the format, it’s important to know that decks like Izzet Phoenix, Azorius Spirits, Azorius Control, and Hidden Strings Combo are all not only untouched by the bans, but likely don’t even need to change a single card to account for a “new” format.

OK, are we gonna talk about Nadu Summer in Modern or…?

Yes! Or rather, the end of it! Nadu, Winged Wisdom and Grief being banned from Modern play is also a relatively big deal. Nadu alone effectively broke the Pro Tour wide open earlier this year, and Grief has been the headliner of the Rakdos “Scam” archetypes for a long time now. Another not-to-be-named Elemental has already caught a ban in Modern because of the same Rakdos Scam deck! Here’s what I think these bans mean for Modern as a whole:

• Ruby Storm, Goryo’s Vengeance, and the other dedicated combo decks of the format see their winrates nose-dive. Most decks had to dedicate between 4 and 7 slots of sideboard space to a plan against Nadu or Grief decks, and with those slots freed up players can choose to hard-protect themselves vs. combo decks.
• The card Counterspell sees its stocks go way up. Now that you don’t need to worry about a Turn-1 Grief invalidating your counter magic for the entire game or Nadu coming off the back of a Delighted Halfling or Cavern of Souls, Blue pilots can rejoice!
• Energy decks will NOT become the new “best deck”. I think that title will end up going to 4-Color Omnath, Locus of Creation, Dimir Murktide Regent or something with Kozilek’s Command. With players being able to afford to use deck space on cards like Supreme Verdict or Toxic Deluge, I think Ocelot Pride will definitely be a good card but it won’t get out of hand.

Hooray! Dimir is dead, FINALLY! 

Let’s not push it. For anyone who doesn’t know, “The Dimir Deck” of Legacy was called Dimir Re-Scaminator. The name comes from the combination of being a Reanimator deck with Reanimate and Animate Dead with free interaction like Grief, Daze, and Force of Will. This deck was efficient to the point where it was legitimately approaching 50% of the Legacy metagame, and pretty much every content creator called this ban.

• What the above paragraph doesn’t mention is that the other giant Dimir “problem card”, Psychic Frog, is alive and well in Legacy. The fear most people have is that 2-mana cards that give you card advantage are usually enough to break a blue-based tempo deck in half. Cards like Wrenn and Six, Dreadhorde Arcanist, and Expressive Iteration have all found themselves banned from Legacy play for this exact reason. Dimir or Grixis Tempo is straight-up going to be the new best deck in Legacy (again).
• With this said, I expect Legacy to be a bit of a Wild West over the next few weeks. Psychic Frog tempo decks aside, Grief leaving the format opens up a relatively large pool of decks to choose from. Decks that want to assemble Card A + Card B will be a lot more viable than they have been previously!

You play Vintage? Is Spirits even a deck in Vintage?

Only a little. And no, it’s not. I play Merfolk! Just enough to understand these changes.

The important part to know here is that in Vintage, cards typically get restricted to one copy in your 75, rather than outright banned like every other format. The exceptions to this are cards that are banned for dexterity reasons (Chaos Orb), ante reasons (Jeweled Bird), or for offensive reasons (Invoke Prejudice)… and Lurrus of the Dream-Den.

As for the “why”, in a format like Vintage where every card’s individual power level is super-high, Urza’s Saga represents 3 good cards in one and, while Ancestral Recall technically fits this description, you can at least counter Ancestral. Vexing Bauble is both an offensive and defensive tool for just one mana, which is especially threatening when you can get it with Urza’s Saga! The short list of cards Vexing Bauble solves is: Black Lotus, every Mox, Force of Vigor, Force of Will, and Mental Misstep. This comes pretty close to covering every base you’d need to think about in Vintage, and that’s way too much power for a one-drop. Especially one that you can just sacrifice to draw if you don’t need it!

OK, you were right. That was a LOT of changes.

This is one of the biggest updates I’ve seen in a very long time, and if I’m being honest I welcome a nice, fresh feel to multiple formats. Hopefully a lot of you reading this also enjoy the “new” formats to come! Time to get back to gaming and seeing what people will come up with, and I’ll see y’all on the next one!