Wizards of the Coast has made their Banned and Restricted Announcement today, making changes to multiple formats. MTG Arena will also be affected as of July 16th 2020 (coinciding with Jumpstart’s release) in the Historic format only. The changes will be as follows:

Format	Card Name	Legality
Historic	Agent of Treachery	Banned (from Suspended)
Historic	Winota, Joiner of Forces	Banned (from Suspended)
Historic	Fires of Invention	Banned (from Suspended)
Historic	Nexus of Fate	Banned
Historic	Burning-Tree Emissary	Suspended
Pioneer	Oath of Nissa	Unbanned
Modern	Arcum's Astrolabe	Banned
Pauper	Expedition Map	Banned
Pauper	Mystic Sanctuary	Banned

Read below for more details, with official explanations on the changes today. You can also check out the official list of all banned and restricted cards, by format, here.

Historic

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Historic has by far the largest number of bans today, but that’s largely due to three cards that were previously suspended making the jump to being properly banned – Agent of Treachery, Fires, and Winota each had about a month of suspension. Check out our June 1st and June 12th announcements to read up on the explanations and background information for those!

Nexus of Fate, long branded by pros and regular players alike as one of the greatest mistakes of the last few years, has finally gotten the axe. While it was previously banned from best-of-one play, it has been moved onto the banlist altogether now, to the relief of much of the player base, since it has been a top tier deck ever since the format’s release, and possibly the most miserable deck to play against. Nexus could take infinite turns as early as turn 5, using Wilderness Reclamation and Growth Spiral, and this was a plan that was extremely hard to counter since it attacked from such a strange angle – you often had to have instant speed Enchantment removal to even have a hope. All the Nexus deck had to do was continuously dig up enough copies of the eponymous card, which was easy enough with all the deck’s ways to find cards, such as Tamiyo, Collector of Tales and Search for Azcanta, and it could lock the other player out of the game and gain such ludicrous card and mana advantage from its extra turns that, even if it bricked, it was trivial to recover. Wizards made the move to banning Nexus immediately, rather than suspending it first, which speaks to how much evidence against the card there is by now!

Burning-Tree Emissary has been a key card in various aggro decks ever since it was released in a supplementary product – the very first Historic Anthology back in November 2019! The fury of a 0 mana 2/2 has been enough to put Gruul Aggro, long one of Historic’s best decks, especially over the top, with such nut draws as t1 Llanowar Elves t2 as many Emissaries as you have in hand and then a 3 drop being possible, and when you’re following up with cards like Embercleave which heavily reward having a lot of creatures in play early, it’s easy to see how this got out of hand. Without BTE, Gruul Aggro should have significantly slower starts, and its best draws will be easier to counter. That being said, I do wonder whether Llanowar Elves itself was not a better suspension, as we’ve seen recently how powerful 1 mana acceleration can be, BTE wasn’t seeing play in some of the recent bigger Gruul decks, and Elves is an even more important piece of the Gruul nut draw… I suspect Wizards didn’t want to cripple a whole host of other Green decks in doing so (though they instead hurt Mono Red Aggro, which also used BTE often); we’ll see how that pans out!

The bans go live on Arena on July 16th, and all but Burning-Tree Emissary will incur wildcard refunds, so get crafting if you want them for free! Check the following quote from Wizards, for clarification on how the process works:

When cards are fully banned in Historic you will receive Wildcard reimbursement as normal, with the caveat that you won’t receive multiple reimbursements for the same, individual card.

For example: A player has collected two copies of Card X when it is banned in Standard, and they receive two Wildcards at that time. Later, the card is also banned in Historic. Though they still have two copies, they won’t receive additional Wildcards because they’ve already been reimbursed for the copies they have. However, if they had crafted (or otherwise collected) more copies between the Standard ban and the Historic ban, they would receive reimbursement for those new copies after the Historic ban.

Pioneer

Pioneer started life as a format from which cards were banned almost weekly. Oath of Nissa was banned in one of the earlier weeks (alongside Leyline of Abundance, which remains banned) as a means of keeping the Green Ramp decks with Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx from overwhelming the format. Oath of Nissa had much the same problem as a card like Ponder or Preordain (two cards that have been illegal in most formats for many years – even Modern, a much more powerful format than Pioneer – and define the landscape of Legacy, one of Magic’s most powerful formats), where it provided a lot of consistency to decks far too cheaply. It even had some advantages over those cards (while being far less powerful), since it was a permanent that remained in play and buffed your Green devotion, and it made splashing planeswalkers like Oko much more consistent. However, it seems like a fine unban at this point, since the actual problem cards in Once Upon a Time and Oko, Thief of Crowns have long been removed from the landscape of Pioneer. Perhaps its re-introduction will push some people to play Yorion, Sky Nomad in Pioneer, since Oath + Yorion is a pretty powerful combo, and Oath can help dig up the Yorion in the first place!

Many were expecting a ban from Dimir Inverter Combo, one of Pioneer’s top decks, in the form of Inverter of Truth itself or Dig Through Time (though if you ban Dig, people will simply start using Treasure Cruise, and won’t lose really that much). Wizards notes that they’re happy with the format as is, since Inverter isn’t putting up dominant results in Magic Online’s queues, and will continue to monitor its best decks going forward, including other combo decks like Lotus Breach (a deck that seeks to untap Lotus Field repeatedly to generate colossal amounts of mana, to then use with Underworld Breach to kill your opponents with a card as innocuous as Tome Scour) and Mono White Heliod + Walking Ballista Combo. That being said, I think a lot of people are disappointed that some action wasn’t taken against these decks since, whether or not they’re putting up dominant results, those people feel as though they are a net negative for the format in being uninteractive, difficult to disrupt, and unfun (the three classic complaints surrounding combo decks in general!).

Modern

Arcum’s Astrolabe, even in a year such as 2019 which had the most bannings on record in over a decade, has stood out as one of the most egregious mistakes, having already been banned in Pauper. The card has provided a level of consistency to Modern mana bases where people were able to play 3-4 colour decks including cards with extremely hard casting costs, such as Cryptic Command and Archmage's Charm, with impunity. For a while now, Modern decks have looked very alike, all incorporating the same powerful cards and not really caring about colour at all, and Astrolabe was responsible for much of this (though fetchlands are even more to blame), as the lynchpin in some of Modern’s best decks such as 4-colour Snow and Urza. Now that Astrolabe is banned, the homogenisation of Modern decks it caused should ease off a little, and the Snow deck will become weaker and probably drop a colour. Since Snow-Covered basic lands still count towards Ice-Fang Coatl and Dead of Winter, enabling Snow is still easy enough, however.

If you thought Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath was a problem in Standard, know that the card is even more powerful in Modern, where fetchlands are available and so his Escape is much less of a cost. Uro was in every Astrolabe deck, and has led to many of the best Modern decks including Green and Blue. Much of the community was calling for an Uro ban, but it appears that Wizards has decided to leave it at only Astrolabe for now and see how decks like Simic Urza and Bant Snow, which include both cards, adjust.

Overall, here’s hoping Wizards learns from this mistake and stops printing cards that replace themselves and provide a ton of value in doing so at 1 mana; the investment is too cheap for the gains Astrolabe provides. If you’d like to learn more about Modern, check out the meta’s best decks!

Pauper

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Today’s Pauper bans feature a very old card and a very new card! Expedition Map is a card that is synonymous with Tron at this point, a strategy that tries to get Urza’s Tower, Urza’s Mine, and Urza’s Power Plant into play as early as possible, to produce 7 mana as early as turn 3, and then casts all manner of expensive colourless threats. Tron is more famous in Modern, where it has been one of the format’s staple decks ever since the format’s release in 2011, but has proven even more oppressive in Pauper, where the tools to attack the strategy are harder to come by. Tron does not have the same win conditions available as in Modern, so it has to do slower more value-oriented things such as flickering various cards with powerful enter-the-battlefield effects such as Mulldrifter (my namesake and a format staple in Pauper!). As it turns out, when you have so much mana available so early, you can just do what everyone else does but much better. Expedition Map’s banning removes one of the most consistent tools for assembling Tron early, and so the deck should be weaker and slower.

Mystic Sanctuary, a mistake among so many from Throne of Eldraine, has been a staple in any format with fetchlands, since for some reason it is an Island. As another card featured in the many-coloured Modern Control decks, Sanctuary has allowed decks to repeatedly recur all manner of game-winning spells, from Cryptic Command to Fatal Push to Lightning Bolt, whatever best befits your current situation. In Pauper, Sanctuary combines with Ghostly Flicker in a particularly busted way: Ghostly Flicker can target lands, so you flicker the Sanctuary and something else, putting Flicker back on top of your library, and essentially go infinite if the something else draws a card – if you flicker Mulldrifter and the Sanctuary, you net one extra card each Flicker, and so get to draw your entire deck. In a format like Pauper, which tends to be on the slower side, this lock is pretty easy to set up, and once you’ve drawn your deck it is trivial to win the game. While there were busted combos with it, Mystic Sanctuary really saw any play in any heavy Blue deck with a lot of spells, which is many of the good decks in the format anyway, since Delver of Secrets is one of the premier Pauper threats.

Standard

Unfortunately, it seems there is no Standard ban announcement planned, at least for now…