Magic: The Gathering’s long-awaited Standard banlist update has arrived, and three cards have been barred to try and cut down on black and red’s format-warping power.
Fable of the Mirror-Breaker//Reflection Of Kiki-Jiki, Reckoner Bankbuster, and Invoke Despair have all been banned. However, other cards, like Sheoldred, The Apocalypse and Cut Down, have survived to cause havoc for a little bit longer.
Announced on the official MTG site, these bans will be coming into immediate effect in tabletop play and Magic Online, and from May 30 on Arena. In the announcement, Wizards reiterated its new approach to card bans, saying it will be only banning cards outside of the new annual banlist update if they have “immediately and dramatically [had] a negative impact on the format”.
Perhaps the biggest ban here is for Reckoner Bankbuster, a colourless Vehicle card printed in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. As it’s colourless, any deck can run it without having to splash out into other colours, and it provides a reliable source of card draw early in the game. It being a Vehicle has also played a role in its banning, as creatures too small to crew it don’t often see as much play.
Invoke Despair has long been a deck-defining card, serving as a primary win condition. It can remove your opponent’s permanents or deal damage to them if they have nothing to remove, making it incredible flexible. Invoke Despair replaced a lot of “one-for-one removal”, as why would you play a card that can only remove one type when Invoke Despair can take out three at the same time?
Wizards has said that Invoke Despair made it “especially difficult to find ample counterplay to black strategies as it is an effective card to cast on empty boards and preys upon the enchantments and planeswalkers that are historically effective against these types of removal-heavy strategies”.
The final card to be banned, surprising absolutely nobody, is Fable of the Mirror-Breaker. Yet another card from Neon Dynasty, this Saga enchantment did too many ‘generically good’ things, like generating resources via Treasure tokens and filtering cards out of your hand. With the arrival of Atraxa, Grand Unifier in Phyrexia: All Will Be One, Mirror-Breaker’s utility only increased, as it was an easy way to dump Atraxa into your graveyard ready to be a great reanimation target.
All three of these bans are designed to hit the black/red-using decks that have completely dominated Standard in recent months. At the time of writing, the top two decks both use black/red and have a 44.4 percent share of the meta. For a game with around 20 different colour combinations and a near-infinite number of potential decks, these three cards appearing so frequently at the top was a sign things needed to change.
However, a few cards surprisingly avoided the banhammer, and Wizards has yet to explain why. Other frequently-played cards like Sheoldred, The Apocalypse; Cut Down, or Bloodtithe Harvester were not even acknowledged. It is possible that Wizards is going to take until the next banlist update on August 7 to assess how Standard adapts after these three bans, and see whether Sheoldred really is as nasty as she seems without them.