Hello, Pauper fans! This is Gavin Verhey from Wizards of the Coast and the Pauper Format Panel (PFP). I'm here today on behalf of the panel with some changes to the format we've been working on for a while and are ready to bring to you. It's a fairly substantial round of changes, so I encourage you to read through all of our reasoning for the bans and unbans we're doing today.

At the time of the last banned and restricted announcement, we wanted a little longer to observe the format before rolling out some changes. We spent the last few months not only observing but building decks to test out what various bans or unbans may do, playing games, and discussing the results. And today, we're ready to act.

I'll get right into what is happening at the top today, and then I'll explain why. We're banning Basking Broodscale , Deadly Dispute , and Kuldotha Rebirth . We're unbanning Prophetic Prism and High Tide on a trial basis. These changes are effective immediately in tabletop Magic and will be live shortly on Magic Online around noon today.

Why these cards? How did we determine this? What do I mean by trial unbanning? Let's dig in!

State of the Format

Overall, the format is varied. There are tons of decks you can play, with many of them hovering between 48% and 53% win rates. The win-rate gaps in the format are small, and there's a ton of ability to play what you want and innovate.

However, there's more than just the numbers. While things can be balanced, that doesn't mean that the play patterns are the most fun, or the same packages aren't showing up across tons of decks and making things feel homogenous, or that the polarity of certain matchups is ideal.

To do this, we looked at a lot of Magic Online data (you will see us reference some win percentages below), tabletop tournament results, and conducted our own testing. While no one tournament or event makes or breaks our decision-making process, we look across them all in aggregate. I'll also mention that we finalized these decisions before the recent Paupergeddon event, though we saw nothing from that event that caused us to change course on any decisions.

Today's changes are meant to address these issues and, in general, slow the format down slightly while addressing some play-pattern notes. Our hope is this will bring some old decks back, remove a frustrating combo deck, and create a whole new archetype.

Let's go through card by card.

Banned: Basking Broodscale

When Modern Horizons 3 released last year, with it came Basking Broodscale . This created an unexpected new combo deck: by putting Sadistic Glee on a creature while controlling a Broodscale, whenever a creature dies, it puts a counter on the Broodscale. This then triggers the Broodscale, creating a token you can sacrifice to gain mana. This triggers again and creates a loop that results in boundless colorless mana and a creature that kills in one hit. Factor in that the Broodscale itself can adapt to start the engine, and this becomes a two-card combo that can kill early in the game—and is still just as lethal later in the game.

When a new deck shows up, we often want to give it time to watch the format build and react to it. Sometimes, decks will show up and be very strong, then the metagame will evolve, adapt, and it will just become a part of the metagame puzzle. Other times, a new deck will appear weak but gain strength over time as people begin to converge on a build and add resiliency to it. Usually, it's worth waiting a little bit to see how things evolve and change.

In the case of the Glee Combo deck, when it showed up with the release of Modern Horizons 3, it was far from its most powerful incarnation. But with time, the deck has become tighter and more refined. The metagame has adapted around it, with the deck boasting about a 53.5% win percentage right now, which is good but otherwise acceptable. However, its impact on the metagame remains huge. Everybody must be able to deal with a fast Glee Combo, and cards like Snuff Out and discard spells have risen in value to make sure there are counter-measures. New decks have even arisen in part because they're strong against Glee, like Jund Wildfire. The pressure this combo has exerted and continues to exert on the format is immense.

Additionally, it's just not that fun to lose to. A lot of decks are invalidated because they have trouble answering an early combo, and as people come into the format, it's a huge barrier to run into. It really restricts the amount of viable decks. We were close to doing it during the last banned and restricted window but elected to wait to see things evolve a little further, and it's only become clearer that it needs to go.

Why Broodscale over Glee for the combo piece? Glee has existed for 27 years without causing any combo problems. It's also far more likely we print something more like a Sadistic Glee in the future that causes this combo to happen again—you can very easily imagine another common that does this—than it is we make something that creates a token with a sacrifice ability when a counter is placed on it. And so, Broodscale goes.

Banned: Deadly Dispute

Broodscale may be the combo piece in a deck of much discussion, but there has been another card a little more subtly hanging over Pauper.

Over the past year, we've seen a lot of decks converge on the Deadly Dispute and Ichor Wellspring draw engine. When it comes to card advantage and raw material in Pauper, this cavalcade of draw-two cards is unmatched. Many top decks in the format, ranging from Affinity, Glee, and Wildfire to Pactdoll and Gardens, all play four copies of Dispute and four copies of Wellspring. Most other card-draw options have been pushed out, and it's a considerable reason to play black. Any time you begin to look at Top 6-plus decks within many different archetypes and they're all playing the same eight core cards, it's cause for a bit of concern. (For example, this decision was made and the article mostly written just before Paupergeddon a couple weekends ago, but that Top 8 featured seven decks with 4 Deadly Disputes!) It can begin to homogenize the format.

We looked into banning Dispute , Ichor Wellspring , and other draw-two cards (like Eviscerator's Insight ) and Ichor Wellspring replacements, like Mephitic Draught . How were we going to break this up with this many redundant pieces? Should we just live with it? Ban tons of cards?

We wanted to act on this but also wanted community opinions. I asked about this a couple months ago in a recent video around the time of the last banned and restricted announcement, and over the past few months, many Pauper fans and pundits have also taken the side that yes, action should be taken.

While there is substantial redundancy, after a lot of playing and analysis, it became clear Deadly Dispute was just a huge cut ahead of the others. While it certainly looks similar in structure, the treasure does everything from making the card cost functionally one mana to accelerating you to your bigger threats, fixing your colors, and providing an extra artifact for Affinity decks. This is a large advantage over the comparable ones.

There is still a lot of redundancy, and we want to be clear that we don't expect this to cut out the engine entirely—we would need to ban Wellspring and maybe Draught to do that. I would still expect to see people playing Wellspring alongside Eviscerator's Insight , Reckoner's Bargain , and others. But losing Dispute is a meaningful enough ding that we expected it will weaken these decks and reduce players defaulting to black and the Dispute plus Wellspring package. We'll certainly be keeping our eye on how this plays out.

Banned: Kuldotha Rebirth

In the past, we've talked some about format polarity and speed. The format has sped up considerably in the past few years, and the cheap tools available at common have become stronger and stronger. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Mono-Red.

Mono-Red serves a very important role in the format, helping keep things honest so incredibly slow decks don't dominate. But by the same mark, it's always a careful balance to make sure it isn't creating too much of that pressure and warping too much of the format around the ability to deal with it. It is the most played deck in Magic Online Leagues, so it's everywhere.

Looking at the deck now, we see very similar data to the time around when we banned Monastery Swiftspear . While the deck is winning around 53% of its matches—totally within bounds—its Game 1 win rate is outrageous. Against Terror, Glee, Wildfire, and Red-Green Ramp, it boasts a whopping 65% to 70% Game 1 win rate, and against many other decks, it hovers in the 55% to 60% range. There is not a single deck among the most-played decks that it has a bad Game 1 matchup against—you have to dig down to decks like Dredge and Elves (about 2% of the metagame each) before you start finding matchups where it's disadvantaged in the first game.

Now, after sideboarding the story changes against several of these decks, most of those matchups flip unfavorably. But that kind of polarity is far, far higher than what we'd like to see.

This kind of polarity can be really damaging. If most decks have to sideboard a lot of cards for a single popular deck to beat it, it reduces how many slots you have for other decks in the format. It puts a lot of pressure on sideboard cards and how many you draw, which reduces your agency. Ideally, red would be a little weaker and people would feel like they need to sideboard against it a little less, which creates more of a natural situation where it's less about pre- or post-sideboard games.

What happened here? Part of it could be how the format has evolved to where it is now, and people have had to adapt more for Glee with cards like Snuff Out . Some of it could just be the tools that have slowly and incrementally improved red, like Goblin Tomb Raider , Reckless Lackey , and Clockwork Percussionist . But in any case, this deck is at an unacceptable position and even once the metagame adapts to account for the above two bans, it's likely that polarity will remain roughly true.

We talked about several cards to hit. We could hit a newer card like the Tomb Raider , which provides de facto Goblin Guide . But ultimately, though it has been part of the format for a long time, Kuldotha Rebirth is the card that often creates the most polarizing games and makes it tough to stabilize. You can deal with all the threats on the board and still easily die to Rebirth alongside Goblin Bushwhacker out of hand. Turn three, attack for minimum 8 damage using those two cards—plus whatever else you already cast—just really seals the deal … and even if you mount an early defense, that conjunction can put the game out of reach.

We'd love to see more control enter the environment, and the long-game reach of this card is one more tough thing to contend with. Of the two, between Bushwhacker and Rebirth , we'd rather hit the one that also gives you value out of cards like Experimental Synthesizer and Clockwork Percussionist .

Our hope is that this will help bring red back to a level where it's not as polarizing. It's something we will continue to watch to make sure this didn't hit red too hard—as mentioned before, it is a careful balance—but we expect red should remain playable with these changes and the format's evolution.

Other Decks and Cards

While here, I wanted to just give an overview of other decks in the format.

Percentage-wise, nothing seems too out of line on match win rate. We see 53.5% as the highest among any of the most-played decks when it comes to overall win rate. What we've hit today is largely for metagame impact and play pattern. It is not totally clear how things are going to look when the dust settles, of course.

We did talk about the Bridges again. We were close to removing them at points but ultimately decided against it. For one, we wanted to see where the format stood in the wake of these pretty substantial changes before removing a huge pillar. Second, we thought the ban of Deadly Dispute would be a notable ding to the power of Affinity and artifact lands. We did a bunch of playtesting on the PFP and found that the ban of Deadly Dispute did significantly impact the deck. While far from killing it—Affinity should still be plenty playable—this is a notable loss for the archetype. Depending on where Affinity ends up, and how much of the format continues to use this mana base, changes involving these lands may be necessary in the future.

One other card we did want to talk about is Writhing Chrysalis . Many people have called for the banning of this card. And although the ban of Deadly Dispute and Basking Broodscale very slightly weakens Chrysalis, nothing has changed about the innate power of the card. So, I thought it would be helpful to talk about our feelings on it.

This card is absolutely a rate outlier. There's a reason it's a common that absolutely warped the format in Modern Horizons 3 Limited: it's a four-mana 4/5 that comes with two mana … and that's on top of all the fringe benefits like the tokens being uncounterable, it not being red so it can't be Blue Elemental Blast ed, playing a second one after the first one, and so on.

It is a very strong card—no denying that. However, for a long time, Pauper had a bit of a midrange gap. Things were either compressed in quick aggressive decks or in very long-game decks like Tron.

That has gotten a lot better recently—and that is in part due to Chrysalis . It's a great midrange threat that incentivizes people to run bigger removal spells, beats Myr Enforcer in combat, and helps bridge the gap to fight against aggressive decks.

I expect Chrysalis to be a cornerstone card of Pauper: it's strong! But it is locked into two colors and fills an important role. We are not planning to ban it currently, unless the shape of the format dramatically changes.

Trial Unbans

At the top I said we were trying two unbans on a trial basis. What does this mean?

We want to try something new as an experiment. No other format has really tried this, and we think Pauper is a great place to experiment. You should not expect to see this in any other formats, and it's something the PFP is specifically interested in and thinks Pauper can handle given the accessibility of building decks and the predominance of online play.

There are some cards that have been banned in Pauper but are beloved by many. The format has evolved a lot in recent years, and it's not clear they all deserve to stay on the banned list. Trial unbans provide a way to try them out.

It works like this: a trial unban involves unbanning the card with the expectation that, before the next banned and restricted announcement, we will reevaluate if the card should remain unbanned. We'll share our expectations of what we are hoping happens with that card and compare that to the reality.

Not every unban in the future will necessarily be a trial unban, but it's a great tool in our toolbox. This is something new, so let us know what you think.

Now, let's talk about the two cards in question.

Unbanned: High Tide

This is the big one. High Tide has a very unique Pauper history.

High Tide 's legality has always been a subject of dispute. Back before the tabletop and online formats were unified, and tabletop used printed legality and online used online legality with sets like Vintage Masters, High Tide was only legal in tabletop. It was a common in Fallen Empires but had only ever been in Magic Online at higher rarities.

There wasn't much history of High Tide being strong in tabletop Pauper—but there simply just weren't that many events to prove it out. And when the unification happened, High Tide was put on the banned list as a precaution. It certainly looked dangerous.

We want to try it for a few reasons.

For one, plenty of people wish spell-based combo could be more viable. While we think it's unhealthy if spell-based combo is the best thing you can do, it is a staple of Eternal formats and is helpful if represented. It can also prey on decks that just want to go super long. While Broodscale wasn't the right combo to leave legal, some combo is good and healthy.

Second, there are missing pieces and answers. Pauper has banned some of the strongest pieces: Cloud of Faeries , Peregrine Drake , and Frantic Search , for example. (Though Snap is still legal!) The format has sped up a lot. There are eight various red Blasts you can play and so on.

And third, it's a fan favorite! It formerly enabled a Legacy deck and has been something memorable. We've held back on unbanning it for a long time because of how dangerous it can be to bring back. But in the interests of expanding the format and giving people something they enjoy, we wanted to give it a try.

We on the Pauper Format Panel spent a lot of time building up High Tide lists and talking about it. Our lists seemed reasonable and weren't overly strong—with that said, we also recognize that thousands of players will quickly reach much stronger lists than the seven of us. So that's why we want to start with a trial unban here.

Our hope is that the deck ends up, at best, an option in the metagame beneath the very best decks. If it ends up not being played after some experimentation, that's a fine outcome. If it ends up fringe or playable but not in the best decks, that's the ideal outcome. These scenarios will leave it unbanned.

If it breaks through and enables one of the three most successful decks in the metagame, however, we will likely ban High Tide again at the end of the trial—having a kill-from-hand combo deck as one of the best three decks can be frustrating. Not every color can interact with that stretch super well.

The next banned and restricted announcement is June 30, and you can expect to hear from us about High Tide 's fate then.

In the unlikely but plausible scenario, given the combo history of High Tide , that the format becomes completely dominated by High Tide to the point where very little else is playable, we may step in earlier to act. But it would have to be wildly extreme for that to happen, especially since it's important to give it time to see how the format evolves.

I'm really excited to see what you all do with the card, and we'll be monitoring closely!

Unbanned: Prophetic Prism

Prophetic Prism is a much different story than High Tide . This was a more recent ban, and one we had a hand in. At the time, Tron was dominating, and Affinity was using this to fix its mana.

It's a narrow ledge you walk with both these decks, and we on the PFP have debated returning Prism for a long time. But times have changed dramatically, and now we'd be happy seeing Tron show up a bit more!

However, there was always a reasonable concern it could go right back to causing the same problems it was just a few years ago. The printing of Energy Refractor has given us a lot of confidence that Prism would be fine, though it is still certainly a lot more playable in a deck like Affinity than Refractor.

However, while Prism is not a card that is generally intrinsically too powerful, it can create a lot of homogeneity and cause players to jam all the best cards in one deck. That is undesirable for the format.

We decided a trial unban would finally be a moment we could take it off and see what happens. We believe the most likely outcome is that things in the format will not dramatically change.

However, with three large bans the format, it is poised for a considerable shakeup, especially given Deadly Dispute was doing a partial job of mana fixing in Affinity before. Just to be cautious, we decided to give the same treatment to Prism .

The main metrics we'll be watching is how much it impacts Affinity, Tron, any new decks, and if it creates any kind of color homogeneity.

If Flicker or Control Tron resurges a little without taking a firm top seat, that's great. If Affinity plays a couple of these, that's fine as well. If it shows up in some other decks, like Synthesizer, sure.

However, if it really boosts Tron and Affinity to undesirable strength levels as two of the best decks or homogenizes the format by putting a bunch of similar cards in one deck, then we will send it back to the banned list.

A Fresh Pauper

That's a ton happening today. We're very interested to see what happens next.

In addition to upcoming leagues and paper events, there are some big online Pauper events coming up this spring and summer on Magic Online that we'll be keeping an eye on. There's a Regional Championship Qualifier on May 16, a Regional Championship Super Qualifier on July 12, and MOCS Showcase Challenges June 7, July 5, and August 2. This is your potential path to the Pro Tour starting with playing Pauper, so be sure to get out there and play.

I want to take this moment to provide two large thank yous. One is to the Pauper community, who has given us tons of useful feedback over the last few months. Thanks to everybody who chimed in.

Second, I want to thank the Pauper Format Panel. It took a lot of work and discussion to get here, and in addition to talking, arranging to playtest across time zones isn't easy. I'm so happy to be able to work with this team.

We'll be watching what happens out there in Pauper. Thanks for playing the format, and feel free to let us know what you think!

On behalf of the entire Pauper Format Panel,

Alex Ullman
Alexandre Weber
Emma Partlow
Gavin Verhey
Mirco Ciavatta
Paige Smith
Ryuji Saito