After the conclusion of the 2020 Season Grand Finals (click on the link for our full coverage of the tournament), where we saw five of the top 8 Standard decklists Omnath, Locus of Creation dominate the tournament and take the top prize, Wizards confirmed that the next banned and restricted announcement will be happening on October 12 impacting Standard, Historic and Brawl.
It appears that the speculation was indeed correct, and the decision was already made – the question is, how hard will they hit the formats already ravaged by the high powered cards? This should happen somewhere between 7 to 8 AM PST going by previous timing of the announcements, and we may get a short window before being able to craft the banned cards to get the Wildcard refunds. Keep your eyes out for the post here later today!
(2/2) Following this weekend's tournament results and analysis of play data over the last few weeks, there will be an update tomorrow impacting Standard, Historic, and Brawl.
Here’s a bit of a speculation post today, folks! Thanks to some research from Fireshoes on Twitter, we’ve discovered that the Wizards website has an article up on the banlist page for October 12th, two days from now. Ordinarily, we would just get a “page not found” error on visiting this page, but instead it says we’re not authorised to access it; that means there is something there, we just can’t see it!
Players have been very vocally upset about the Omnath meta, especially in Standard. Recent tournament entries show that it has an unhealthy portion of the meta, putting up 72% of the share of decks at the recent Grand Finals, beating out even the Oko meta for overrepresentation.
The reasoning is sound, and if you check other dates such as October 19th (the Monday the week after), you won’t find anything.
Against
Wizards normally announces banlist updates several days in advance at least, so this would be a departure from their usual protocol. However, people have asked them to have bans go into place quicker, and they could be trying something new out.
It’s possible that Wizards has dates regularly blocked off in case there are announcements, and we haven’t found a pattern yet. That being said, it stands to reason that the week after would be blocked off too then…
Wizards could be waiting on the results of the Grand Finals to make a decision – they may only have an announcement if a deck overperforms egregiously.
Omnath hasn’t yet proven itself beyond doubt in Historic, so it seems less likely that Wizards would ban it there. Will we see a Historic and Standard banlist update, or simply a Standard one?
Possible targets
Omnath is the ban on everyone’s lips, the symptom of the ramp problem we see in Magic right now. Still, he is the frontrunner card of the recent expansion, and it would hurt pack sales to ban him..
Lucky Clover is an absurd card at 2 mana, which generates a colossal and often insurmountable advantage for Adventure decks, and have led to them running roughshod over multiple Standard environments already. If Omnath is banned, there is a real danger of Temur Adventures simply taking up its mantle immediately.
Lotus Cobra is a 2 mana card that you must kill immediately, or you often just lose the game. That being said, it does encourage every deck in the meta to run removal rather than just more busted threats…
Bonecrusher Giant is a 4-of in every Red deck, no matter what their gameplan is. It was the most played card at the recent Grand Finals, with a staggering 91.4% of the decks running it. Still, being overrepresented doesn’t make it necessarily the problem – if there are a lot of good targets for Shock to kill, then why wouldn’t the best version of Shock see a lot of play?
Discuss
What do you think will happen on Monday?
What do you think should happen on Monday? Would you like to see some bans and which ones, if so?
If Wizards are forgoing announcing bans in advance now, do you agree with that change?
Drifter is a draft and strategy specialist, with hundreds of articles under his belt! Of special mention are his Limited Reviews and draft coaching service.
