January 25, 2022, Banned and Restricted Announcement
Announcement Date: January 25, 2022
Standard:
Legacy:
Historic:
Tabletop Effective Date: January 25, 2022
Magic Online and MTG Arena effective date: January 27, 2022
The list of all banned and restricted cards, by format, is here.
Standard
In the October 2021 banned and restricted update, we announced no changes to Standard in anticipation of Innistrad: Crimson Vow's release soon following. Since then, we've heard community feedback that there hasn't been enough change in the metagame over time. While a good number of decks are seeing success on the MTG Arena ladders and each has strengths and weakness against the others, the most played archetypes have remained largely the same over the past months.
As such, we have a set of changes targeted at some of the top decks, including Blue-Red Epiphany and other blue control decks, Mono-White Aggro, and Mono-Green Aggro. Our goal is to create some churn among the current top decks, open up additional angles from which to attack the metagame, and leave room for more experimentation and innovation with the release of Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.
While not entirely dominant throughout the MTG Arena ladders (especially in Best-of-One),
Even without access to
The most winning decks on the MTG Arena ladder, and among the most popular, have been Mono-White Aggro and Mono-Green Aggro. While each owes part of its success to preying upon Blue-Red Epiphany decks, both decks also have high win rates against the field, especially against many of the less popular decks on the fringes.
Legacy
Last summer's Modern Horizons 2 release introduced several high-impact cards to the Legacy card pool, and since then, we've been watching the metagame develop and listening to community feedback. While players' feedback was not unanimous, many have expressed concerns about Blue-Red Delver decks, which picked up some powerful new options from recent sets.
Although recent tournaments (including Eternal Weekend in November) haven't been conclusive in terms of Blue-Red Delver's overall win rate alone, the deck has represented a very large portion of the metagame and posted many top finishes. Magic Online league data shows Blue-Red Delver at over a 56% non-mirror match win rate and more than twice as many trophies earned as the next highest archetype over the past weeks.
In addition to the high league win rates and large tournament metagame population, we've heard much discussion of the tendency of games to snowball from an early
We'll be keeping an eye on how the Legacy format continues to evolve in the coming weeks and are willing to make further adjustments soon, if needed. However, we feel this is a large change and would like to see how the metagame adapts before considering if other changes are necessary.
Historic
Blue decks in Historic continue to remain strong, so
Additionally, as we have rebalanced