Announcement Date: June 9, 2021

Historic:

Time Warp is banned.

MTG Arena effective date: June 10, 2021

When Strixhaven was released, we expected to see significant changes in the Historic metagame due to a host of powerful Mystical Archive cards. We are certainly seeing those results now.

In the recent Strixhaven Championship tournament, five of the Top 8 and all of the Top 4 Historic decks were Jeskai Turns decks prominently featuring Time Warp. In addition to the results of this event, our ladder play data from Historic also shows this to be an extremely powerful deck that is challenging for many other decks to disrupt and boasts very few bad matchups.

Though we often like to see how the metagame adjusts to tournament results like these, when the deck involved has play patterns that prevent the opponent from playing the game and when our data suggests that it lacks a significant number of bad matchups, we favor acting quickly. For these reasons, Time Warp is banned in Historic.

More broadly, the Strixhaven Championship Historic metagame was clearly dominated by blue-red based decks, with Izzet Phoenix and Jeskai Control also proving to be both popular and successful. Much of the discussion has centered on the power of Mystical Archive additions—most notably Brainstorm—and the addition of these cards is something we have been monitoring closely. However, with these decks we see a different pattern than with Jeskai Turns. Both decks provide more opportunities for an opposing deck to counter their strategies, and we also see multiple other top-tier decks that show strong records against one or both. Furthermore, neither deck is demonstrating win rates at the same level as Jeskai Turns. Because of this, we do think a wait-and-watch strategy is best here to see how the metagame adapts to the removal of Jeskai Turns.

We will be monitoring closely to see how the rest of the metagame can adapt, and we are prepared to take further action soon if we do not see things moving in a positive direction.