What Should Have Been Banned In The History of Standard?

The nonsense that was the series of bans starting with Throne of Eldraine was a big part of what demotivated me from continued blogging, but it’s also what finally brought me back.

There's an image going around describing the current state of bannings that isn't quite fair.

Lumping the Kaladesh mistakes with the current ones is a bit dicey. There were massive overhauls after Kaladesh. Play Design was created to prevent another Kaladesh incident, and they fucking failed horribly, but it wasn't the same era of design that made Aetherworks Marvel and Fires of Invention.

Bans were just different for a ton of that time. You only had windows at set releases or specific calendar dates every few months, so your shots had to be sure. 

Standard was different. Did you know prior to 2020 people were actually allowed to play tournaments in other formats and they liked it? Imagine, a game client with more than three years of sets and a dartboard of added stuff. Maybe a bad format for one set had two major events and everyone played Modern instead. There were also just less events, so six weekends of development often meant multiple months of real time as opposed to four weeks after set release.

The Magic economy was different. I'll save my Arena rants for later, but cards costing different dollar amounts but also being sellable resources means people choose decks differently.

I started playing sanctioned, competitive Standard in 2002 and have done so the entire 18 years since. Between that start point of Onslaught and the beginning of this latest shit show with Throne of Eldraine, how many cards would have been banned under today's paradigm?

If you haven't been playing Standard for two decades, you might want Gatherer or Scryfall open for this one.

Reference Decklist: Daniel Zink, 2003 World Champion

Mirari's Wake was a bit of a Standard curiosity for about a year when it was printed in Judgment. It was clearly powerful, but tapping out for a five drop was punished by Psychatog with Force Spike and Counterspell or by Blue-Green Madness with Circular Logic. The kill mechanisms were also clunky and filled with subpar cards, largely centering around Cunning Wish loops with Mirari (you could Wish for exiled cards then) or Burning Wish for Firecat Blitz.

It's possible the problem started at Scourge, when you could just play Decree of Justice for a clean win with your mana and anthem or Cunning Wish could get Hunting Pack. But the dam definitely was broken when 8th Edition traded out the previous counterspells for Mana Leak, which Wake could easily cast. 5 of the 6 undefeated decks in Standard at Worlds were Bant Wake, half the Top 8 was, and it only lost mirrors there.

There are obviously huge parallels to the recent Wilderness Reclamation situation here. Moment's Peace was the Growth Spiral, with two free turns being about a land and a cantrip. It also represented a way to untap freely after Wake if you just had a sixth land to Peace off of, and with the old Wish rules chaining many copies was a given.

I think Moment's Peace would merely be an unfun card without a great home after a Wake ban, but I could be wrong and it may have remained a problem in some weird Mind's Desire deck or something. But Wake had to go at the end.

Probability of a Ban: 100%. Exalted Angel was even the good creature backup plan that Temur Rec had.

Notable No Ban Formats: Post Ban Mirrodin-Kamigawa, Kamigawa-Ravnica

There's a big possibility we were all dumb when Mirrodin was released and Atog Affinity was unbeatable, but after another year the right stuff got cleaned up. Disciple of the Vault was probably excessive, whatever, it and Cauldron Familiar can share that.

Urza's Tower, Plow Under, Chrome Mox, Umezawa's Jitte all were legal after the ban. You couldn't play two colors because the only duals were uncommons lands from Kamigawa that didn't untap if you used them. The format wasn't healthy.

But all the mono-color decks were miserably balanced. There were multiple blue and green decks. And 9th Edition brought Enduring Ideal with Form of the Dragon, which was the cool kind of broken.

Then in Kamigawa-Ravnica Standard rolled around, and there were multiple high tier decks based around playing eight Boomerangs and targeting their land on Turn 2. And Remand was in a million decks, and Umezawa’s Jitte mirrors were an entire pillar of the metagame and there was a combo deck that in retrospect was way better than it got credit for and…. it was totally fine.

I'm going to cite Theros Beyond Death Standard. That format was not good game play as evidenced by how many cards from it are now banned for sucking to play against. But it was playable because the sucky things were rotating in relative power and kinda dynamic. On the flip side of the same, you have 2018 Modern, where there were a million kinda broken things to do that you could be really selective about and do what you wanted. Mirrodin-Kamigawa Standard was on the bad side of that, and Kamigawa-Ravnica was on the great side.

Reference Decklist: Katsuhiro Mori, 2006 Japanese National Champion

I described Kamigawa-Ravnica Standard as a fine format. There was then a two-ish month period when Coldsnap came out where you could play Counterbalance and Sensei's Divining Top in Standard. It wasn't fine.

(Also, I assure you even if that player was suspended from the DCI a while after the event I cited the deck was actually good)

Probability of a Ban: 100%. This was more egregious than about a quarter of the bans that did actually happen.

Reference Decklist: Makahito Mihara, 2006 World Champion

Back in my day, we maindecked Shadow of Doubt to beat Dragonstorm and liked it.

I don’t think Dragonstorm was unbeatable, and the Mystical Teachings decks I'm referencing definitely beat it, but calling it OK to exist is probably stretching it. I’m unsure which of these cards would belong on the banned list, but it sure should have been some of them. That would have cost us the awesomeness that was Perilous Research - Hatching Plans Storm, but that's the fine line between "pretty cool and fine Storm deck" and "kinda just bullshit Storm deck" for you.

Probability of a Ban: 80%. Dragonstorm was beatable even if the play patterns were not great.

Reference Decklist: PVDDR, PT Hollywood Top 8

Pro Tour Hollywood had implications that Faeries wasn’t broken with just Paulo making Top 8, but it was really good and really oppressive to play against. 

Elves and eventually Mono-Red did have solid matchups against it, but I don't know if solid was good enough. I think at best it would end up in a spot like Pioneer Inverter, where it was the best overall deck, but beatable, but also made mid-level players feel horrible. Just like tracking their graveyard size and playing 5D future library size Chess isn't what people play Magic for, starting at UUUB open and trying to route through Spellstutter Sprite, Cryptic Command, Mistbind Clique, Scion of Oona, and later Agony Warp just broke people. 

The two clear issues were Bitterblossom enabling all the Faeries stuff too well and Cryptic Command being what let that deck really dominate many other strategies, with Thoughtseize being kinda reasonable for the power level of the format, and I would put it around a coin flip that one or both of those cards would have been banned today 

Probability of a Ban: 60%. There were decks I would consider good versus Faeries that existed in the format, and the format in general was really high power, so maybe it balances out.

Reference Decklists: Makahito Mihara, PT Hollywood Top 8 ; Gabe Nassif, PT Kyoto Champion

If Faeries went, I think there might be a cascade effect on these cards. Cryptic Command was a big part of both Reveillark and Five-Color Control, but it's possible they would have still dominated without being punished by a more tempo-oriented blue deck. Reveillark was especially well known for being 80% versus the field and 20% versus Faeries, which is part of why it did so well at the previously mentioned PT Hollywood in an era where Faeries could be the best deck but only 20% of the metagame.

Unlike these cards, Spectral Procession proved reasonably assailable over the format. Even if it would be the best card in the format, that's not inherently bad that White Weenie is good and the best card is a non-disruptive three power three-drop creature.

Probability of a Ban: 50%.... If the Bitterblossom ban occurred so net 30%. This is definitely guessing at second order effects.

Reference Decklist: Simon Goertzen, PT San Diego Champion

I don’t fault Wizards for letting some of the late format stuff ride in the past. You could run events in other formats for another couple months because you didn’t tie your entire enterprise to a single program that doesn’t have legacy content and probably isn’t even programmed to support a large chunk of it.

But wow did they miss with Bloodbraid Elf. 

If we played a Worldwake Standard Pro Tour under the same metrics as Mythic Championship Oko, it would be in a similar ballpark of dominance. 

Jund was the lone dominant deck in Standard from October to April. When Rise of the Eldrazi dropped, people made claims a bunch of decks beat Jund. The only one that really competed was Jace, the Mind Sculptor plus Spreading Seas, every other deck that "beat Jund" only beat Jund players with bad lists who didn't understand how to be aggressive or how to sideboard with cascade.

Bloodbraid Elf was so stupid, Primeval Titan plus Valakut being legal in Standard with Explore and Rampant Growth was the GOOD GUY because it beat up on Jund.

"But Ari, LSV 16-0, Mike Flores, Naya Lightsaber" you are wrong your Naya deck is trash. Jund won the PT. Worlds was only 6 rounds of Standard, that Naya deck went 4-2 there, Jund was half the 6-0 or 5-1 decks, and we were still too stupid to play more than 24 mana sources in our three-color deck that only lost if it didn't cast spells. Even the Naya Vengevine decks of the Rise of the Eldrazi era died to Jund players who declared attacks with Putrid Leech instead of trying to block unkillable stuff.

Probability of a Ban: 100%. Bloodbraid Elf in Standard was a taste of 2020 Standard ten years ago.

Notable No Ban: Post-Caw Blade Standard

This format sucked, but everything equally sucked. Splinter Twin and Valakut both existed, but they weren't over powering somehow. If Dimir Control can win US Nationals through that mess, I see no reason the format would default to bannings.

Reference Decklists: Matt Costa, Grand Prix Baltimore Champion ; Brian Kibler, Pro Tour Dark Ascension Champion

These fall under the simply boring category. 

Dark Ascension Standard was not good, and it was these two cards battling into each other that made it that way. There were two decks, each had like eight threats that mattered and 52 blanks when they faced off, but those 52 blanks beat the other 50% of the meta so it was still just them battling.

Maybe you could get away with just Snapcaster Mage. The Primeval Titan end game was getting Inkmoth Nexus and Kessig Wolf Run, and without Snapcaster plus Celestial Purge or Divine Offering pushing down Zombies or Red or Tempered Steel I think other decks could compete and make a fair metagame. This is basically what Primeval Titan did in the Jund era with Valakut: beat up on midrange, pushed aggro and control.

(Gee, overly broad and efficient color-hosing removal is an issue? Who would have Gust'd it?)

Probability of a Ban: 50%? They probably knew Cavern of Souls was coming down the line, so maybe you just wait it out.

Reference Decklist: Me, winning a PTQ

When Magic 2013 dropped Thragtusk and Elvish Visionary with the clock winding down on Birthing Pod in Standard, the card finally broke. Even without an infinite combo, the mix of mana dorks (Birds), untap effects (Deceiver Exarch), and powerful chain ends (Thragtusk, Acidic Slime, Elesh Norn) you could build a Pod deck that had all the answers and the raw power. I won a PTQ where the Finals was kicked off by me destroying two lands a turn from Turn 4 to Turn 6.

This was a Kethis scenario. We got to the end of the format, and suddenly all the pieces came together. Maybe more opposing Gut Shots would stop it, but I'm doubtful.

Probability of a Ban: 80%. Pod is a pretty inherently broken card, it just needs to turn the deck building and card pool corner.

Notable No Bans: Innistrad-Return to Ravnica Standard

Even when every deck was Thragtusk, this was still a good format. And that eventually got cracked open in a ton of ways well before a new set got added. Maybe the end with Magic 2014 Jund was a bit too good with Scavenging Ooze against the Abzan Aristocrats decks, but the format had more than enough flex to fight back if there was more time and iterations to develop against it.

I don't know if this format, the previous Ravnica-Kamigawa, Ravnica-Time Spiral, Khans of Tarkir, or the recent Ravnica Allegiance Standard right before everything failed horribly is the best of all time, but the only other format that is even in contention in my mind is the one right at the start here: pre-8th Edition Onslaught-Odyssey.

There probably should be a whole extra post about how good untapped mana and heavy multicolor themes makes for inherently good Standard formats.

Reference Decklists: Ivan Floch, PT Magic 2015 Champion ; Huey Jensen, PT Magic 2015 Top 8

We were all just too cowardly to play Theros-era Esper Control. There was all this talk about the round timer, but if we were playing with online clocks I think it would have been dominant against the field (that consisted of two and a half other decks). If it was gone, I don't think Mono-Black Devotion at full power would be something you could let survive. 

The format had bad mana and 3 decks anyways, so it may have been unfixable from the start in a way where banning anything caused a cascade to an even worse format.

Probability of a Ban: 50%. Like I said, it might just make things worse.

Reference Decklist: Reid Duke, GP Oakland Champion

Rally the Ancestors was way too good. It had all the staying power of the other midrange decks with Nantuko Husk powered fast kills versus ramp decka and a combo to break mirrors. And this was even before they printed Reflector Mage. I think the deck would have been easily banned if Standard was on year long rotations, but they hoped Kalitas was good enough and just let it ride until it got booted out.

The real question is whether the remaining Four-Color Pile format was acceptable or if the Pioneer maneuver of banning fetches was required. I think it would be totally fine if 4 fetchlands cost 4 rare wildcards and not 1 Benjamin Franklin, which would make it the only time the Arena economy was an upside. The same applies to Jace, Vryn's Prodigy. People generally enjoyed these grindy mirrors if they could afford to buy the cards and play them.

Probability of a Ban: 100%. Unlike Dragonstorm this deck didn’t actually lose to things attacking it.

Reference Decklist: BBD, 2016 World Champion

R&D members have said Collected Company would have been banned with another window between Eldritch Moon and the shortened rotation. The case is made for me.

Probability of a Ban: 100%. They literally said it.

Reference Decklist: Marcio Carvalho, PT Dominaria Top 8

Something needed to go from Rakdos Chainwhirler, I just have no clue what. My best guess is the cheaper cards like Scrapheap Scrounger or Goblin Chainwhirler, because there were too many redundant Chandra, Hazoret, Glorybringer-style cards to ban them all. At top level events it was showing the 40% metagame share, 50% Top 8 results that put it in a dominance tier just below Temur Reclamation, but it was miserably oppressive to the playable cards in the format.

Would that ban in turn make The Scarab God or Teferi, Hero of Dominaria too good? Probably not The Scarab God since that was beatable in Rivals of Ixalan Standard. Maybe Teferi, but that's fairly speculative.

Probability of a Ban: Maybe 50% on each of these individually, but over 80% of at least one of them going.

Reference Decklist: The basic Mountain you used as a proxy for your foil-only card

Yea just fuck everything about this card.

Probability of a Ban: Seriously, fuck it.

Reference Decklist: Stanislav Cifka's Kethis Combo

There's a chance Core Set 2020 should have kicked off the current era of bans, but there weren't iterated events to show it. While I promoted Mono-Red Aggro, that was largely because no one had the respect to play four Cerulean Drake. I didn't play enough Golos or Dinosaurs against Kethis to know if it was actually dominant or merely very good, but it has a lot of the hallmarks of something that was a real issue.

Probability of a Ban: 60%. The format was really high power and might be able to absorb Kethis if it started pulling on stuff too hard, but it wasn’t the most fun way to lose games.

A Throne of Eldraine Limited Design Review

Batting Above Replacement

Credit is absolutely due.

None of the 2019 Limited formats have been all time greats, but they were all set up with the potential for huge systemic issues and none of them were utter failures. Since Guilds of Ravnica Wizards of the Coast has been doing a great job of batting above replacement value on all of them.

We had two heavily factioned Ravnica sets with five core archetypes and only mild alternatives, and both were pretty good and also very unique from the other one. War of the Spark's planeswalker fiesta layout has all sorts of fundamental issues, and it being even remotely reasonable is a miracle. Core Set 2020 was a core set that didn't feel utterly bland and horrible even if it wasn't Magic 2013 levels of good. And Throne of Eldraine had the mono-color needle to thread without the Shadowmoor hybrid playable buffer.

Any of these sets could have easily fallen into the worst of all time category, and instead we got four sets that were all good enough to keep drafting for their expected life time. Add Modern Horizons, which is at or near that all time great tier, and I have almost no concern about the future stewardship of Limited Magic.

Sliding Scale Mono-Color

One of the absurdly amazing factors of Throne of Eldraine that helped it break through some of the normal issues with mono-color sets was the flexibility of Adamant.

If you want some proof this mechanic was designed to perfectly fit Limited, there are zero rares or mythic rares with Adamant.

 

Oh look, you can scale the baseline effect to make Adamant matter more or less. Or you can scale the cost to make the card more or less of a payoff. Vantress Paladin wants you to play at least 12 or 13 Islands, but Garenbrig Paladin is fine with 10 or even just 8 Forests.

That’s another use, an “any color mono-color” card.

 

The more you look at the set, the more you realize a bunch of individual cards say the same basic message of “play mono-color” but tell you to dive into different depths.

The two biggest issues with mono-color formats are the repetitiveness of each archetype and the inability to flex your draft once the ball is rolling (aka you get on a color train and hope it doesn’t lead to garbage town). Throne of Eldraine really has neither of these issues. Even beyond supporting fifteen archetypes of each color pair and each mono-color deck, each color pair is three subarchetypes depending if it’s an even split or skewed in one direction. Not each of these three subarchetypes in a color pair is necessarily good, but the gradient existing gives options and the puzzle of figuring out which ones are good. Your drafts end up looking really unique even dozens of drafts in, and you get really rewarded for knowing exactly what shade of color your deck is going to be and selecting cards appropriately.

I really don’t think I’m doing the nuance here justice, but there’s more points to hit along the way today. Basically, the more you can make your theme a sliding scale the more you can make each deck feel really unique and the less people are forced to lock in Ixalan style in Pack 1 and hope they get all the Vampires and don’t get a bunch of useless Dinosaurs, and Throne of Eldraine did that with flying colors (and the non-flying ones too).

Mono-Color and Sideboarding

While I think the whole Throne of Eldraine plan of promoting mono-color, supporting color pairs worked really well, there was one notable hole in the set's layout that ate into its replayability to me.

Supporting fifteen archetypes requires a lot of playable cards, and Wizards did a good job there. There are less than 10 cards including rares I would describe as F-level unplayables. But that also means every card is playing a specific maindeck role.

You can best see the impact of this with mono-color payoffs. You technically can sideboard in a Vantress Paladin or Locthwain Paladin if you need a random body, but are you really happy with the card in a two color deck or just taking out something that is actually blank in the matchup for a card with power and toughness?

 

This is kinda the flip side of why Guilds of Ravnica had deep replay value even if the draft portion was miserably inflexible. There were only five archetypes, but the set was also light on unplayables. That meant a bunch of cards played dedicated sideboard roles and each matchup shifted drastically between games. There were even re-levels, like Boros downgrading two drops to 2/2s that survived Mephitic Vapors.

 

In Throne of Eldraine, if you had a bad matchup you were mostly dead. The way to make a green deck beat a blue deck was just not draft the Curious Pair half of the color and instead draft the Wildwood Trackers. Or if you are a blue deck, just draft a different color if you need to beat Rimrock Knight. The best sideboarding you could do with many decks was True Love’s Kiss against Revenge of Ravens. Or red against the bulky green Food deck, like Rock-Paper-Scissors. And that’s on top of the issue with mono-color decks and playables, where in actually contested drafts your mono-color deck is not going to have a lot of on-color options on the sidelines by virtue of basic math.

Supporting extra archetypes is definitely better than the alternative of everyone drafting mono-color, but I wonder if Shadowmoor accidentally tried to do things the right way. Only support bridging mono-color into five two-color decks instead of the full ten, just enemy or allied or some weird mix, and see what happens. That way your set has more room to breathe and let decks flex, and there are even pre-defined ways you can expect your mono-color decks to flex that can be scripted to help the skewed matchups. Make black cards that help mono-red when it has to play against the green decks that are just fine with the base black strategy.

White Versus Red, AKA Youthful Knight is Trash

The whole “white has an issue in Limited” thing is well tread at this point.

 

The short version of the problem: white still isn’t allowed to have big creatures, isn’t allowed to have card advantage, and isn’t allowed to have the Kabuto Moth and Blinding Mages it dominated old formats with (for good reason, have you played against a Kabuto Moth?). Or Triplicate Spirits, a card that ruins games by making them card-agnostic counting and multiplication when you cast Fortify or whatever. At the same time every other color gets big creatures and card advantage. So white can only win if it’s effectively aggressive with low drops that stretch relevant into the late game, but that level of aggro leads to formats like Gatecrash and Zendikar and Amonkhet and Ixalan that people don’t like. So we have a color that doesn’t really aggro exceptionally well, has no staying power, has no late game leverage, and just is primed to underperform.

 

Adventure was an absolute delight for white in Throne of Eldraine. If the problem is staying power, the good white adventures were a big step in fixing that. White wasn’t the best color in the set, but I also don’t think it was the worst.

But something stuck with me from my team’s final review of the set. We spent a lot of time discussing the specifics of all fifteen possible color combos (including mono-colors) and the conclusion was largely that there wasn’t a reason to be mono-white. But everyone thought mono-red was the best archetype.

The weird part is that neither color had significant adamant payoffs, and the hybrid four-drops that promoted mono-color decks were similarly strong mediocre. There wasn’t an amazing heavy color commitment low drop in either color, there weren’t distinct differences in mono-color promoting rares. There wasn’t an active set-specific reason to be mono-white or mono-red, but mono-red was great and mono-white was often better off with another color.

When you start comparing the purest, mono-color forms of what works for a color and what doesn’t against each other, things get real clear real fast, and Throne of Eldraine was just the forced perspective to figure it out.

 

Let’s walk down the commons. Scorching Dragonfire, Rimrock Knight, Searing Barrage, Weaselback Redcap. Ardenvale Tactician, Flutterfox, Faerie Guidemother, Trapped in the Tower. Both sets of cards are reasonably close in power. Then what?

Red gets Seven Dwarves and Brimstone Trebuchet. White gets Youthful Knight and Lonesome Unicorn. There seems to be this fundamental idea that Youthful Knight or Pouncing Lynx or Moorland Inquisitor isn’t just Goblin Assailant. Seven Dwarves in multiples steals games, Youthful Knight in multiples just loses games to a 3/3. Similarly late game a five mana 3/3 isn’t getting you anywhere, while Brimstone Trebuchet wins games.

(Some of this is the odd omission of any real white payoffs for Knights. Do the Gatherer Search. White has Shining Armor and Venerable Knight below rare. Black has Barrow Witches, Smitten Swordsmith, and Belle of the Brawl. Red has Brimstone Trebuchet, Joust, Burning-Yard Trainer, Ogre Errant. Why is white the color with multiple commons that are sized and costed as if card type Knight is an upside?)

Red is self consistent. If you literally just stack the red cards up, they all battle well. Even if you have something like War of the Spark’s Invading Manticore, a top end creature that stabilizes for control or grinds well for recursive Rakdos decks, it is still six power for six mana and battles your opponent down. No one ever died to Bulwark Giant beats, or Ardenvale Paladin.

White might actually be the only color is is full on self-inconsistent at lower rarities these days, which is kinda the most common failure mode for colors in draft. Self-inconsistency can be overriden with raw power, as with white in Throne of Eldraine, but any time that slips a bit you start down the road to Battle for Zendikar green, a color that was split between four non-overlapping synergies (Eldrazi, Landfall, Converge, Allies) along with being underpowered. On the flip side you can have white in Core Set 2020 if you have self-consistency even at low power. Every card except Aerial Assault was directly related to battlefield presence and leveraging easy wins in races, and even Aerial Assault did that in certain flying heavy archetypes.

So fixing white in draft is a two-fold problem.

Add leverage to low drops, even if you can’t print Adventures in every set. Ancestral Blade was kinda perfect, a Kabuto Moth without the instant speed considerations of that card, and I would hope to see more cards in that vein.

Stop printing stupid blocking-only cards unless you are going to completely support a control deck in white. Give the color a real long game engine at low rarities if you can’t give it pure card draw, stop this stupid size imbalance where green gets two mana 3/1 but white can’t have a 4/4, or make the defensive leverage Sun-Crested Pterodon that also battles.

Fifteen Archetypes the Medium Way

This was a bit of a leftover realization from Modern Horizons, and might be a bit of a Pro Tour inside-baseball issue.

One thing I learned in the Return to Ravnica to Hour of Devastation era is that early format high-level competitive events are all over the place for draft. People testing in different groups come to wildly different conclusions, preferences are unpredictable, and you are rewarded for having wide knowledge of how to traverse different draft scenarios and exploit whatever is undervalued.

 

Modern Horizons at the MC Hogaak was late in the format. At that event people generally knew how to draft Ninjas, but also that snow-lands shouldn’t wheel and what white cards could convince you to draft the color. Everything was contested, and that changes a lot. If you aren’t the only person willing to speculate on Segovian Angel in a pod, you don’t want to have your C-tier W/U deck facing off against C-tier B/R because B/R is just a better deck in that comparison.

Drafting the medium way is much more rewarded late in formats. You can know all the archetypes, you can know how to draft a successful version of all of them, but you should bias towards the archetypes that tend to land higher on the deck scale in close scenarios. This is especially true in a format like Throne of Eldraine where you are incentivized to lean towards one color and branch out as good stuff shows up. If you start off with two Ardenvale Tactician, then see Syr Elenora and Reave Soul, you should know which of those color pairs better with white and pick accordingly.

For reference, the preferences I listed for Throne of Eldraine just for white to show this idea of routing:

If I start in white, I don’t want to stay entirely mono-white and am likely to end up 10-7 or 9-8 on mana. Black and green are preferable pairings, with W/B being an odd color pair that overperforms low expectations, red is fine but has weird anti-synergies due to the non-Human payoffs, and blue I need a real reason to move into.

And now in general:

I’m avoiding U/R, U/W.

I solidly favor mono-R, G/U, and G/R if given the choice and slightly favor W/B if things are equal.

I’m aiming to splash in “mono”- white, blue, and green, but if I have all red or all black cards that’s great.

Again, this is something that is magnified by this set to become clear in broadly applicable ways. There are incentives to stay mono-color, so there are clear routes where you are base one color and looking for options as opposed to choosing between three colors of playables early. There’s fifteen archetypes instead of ten, so there’s likely to be more above replacement color pairs and more low tier archetypes.

But going back to normal sets, I'm going to be a bit more formal with my descriptions of these kinds of things. Routing, preferences, and what not. It's just one more thing to add to the Limited meeting checklist.

Really Dumb Rares

Yea… the other reason you would stick to early colors that made knowing this routing became so important.

There are 68 unique rares and mythic rares in Throne of Eldraine. At least 35 are bomb rares, where only the 2 best removal (Bake into a Pie and Epic Downfall) and 3 utter bomb uncommons (Trail of Crumbs, Syr Carah, Syr Konrad) are in the same picture. 25 of those were even better than Syr Konrad, a solid historical level “mythic uncommon”. This isn’t even weighted that hard towards Mythics, even accounting for the split rarity over half of packs will contain a slam dunk rare.

That is twice as many as Modern Horizons. That is 1.5 times as many as War of the Spark, a format where everyone complained about the bombiness. I think if you drop down from “rares in the A- or A range” to “rares that absolutely dominate games” dropping cards like Murderous Rider and Stonecoil Serpent you get closer to War of the Spark, but that’s still ignoring context that magnifies the bombs in Throne of Eldraine.

I don’t think bomb heavy formats are necessarily bad. Both Hour of Devastation and Eldritch Moon, two of my favorite formats of all time, are fairly bomb heavy. But Throne of Eldraine just didn’t hit the mix right to make it work. I spend an entire post talking about this after Etheral Absolution, so check that out for some context.

Back to War. War of the Spark was entirely built around the idea you can mitigate planeswalkers with battlefield presence. You could beat most of the rare planeswalkers by having a couple things that attacked well, or one of the many uncommon bomb-lite planeswalkers in the set. You can’t attack a Feasting Troll King off the battlefield, Throne of Eldraine is slow enough that attacking its controller down is rough, and there are far fewer uncommons operating on that high, game solo-ing level of impact. And unlike the Spellgorger Weird days of War of the Spark, there are actually no commons doing that.

You could beat this sometimes with metagame exploits giving you reliably crazy mono-color strategies, but in heavily contested contexts (ie. the Mythic Championship) it felt like a lot of times the best 50ish cards in the format were the only things that mattered in games they were cast. That’s 35 rares and 15 or so bomby uncommons, often hybrid. You would do your best to Faerie Guidemother, Flutterfox, Ardenvale Tactician your way out but sometimes they just draw Lochmere Serpent and there isn’t anything you could do.

A lot of the rares also lacked a scope of unbeatability (see my prior post on making good bomb rares for draft). They are just going to dominate the game regardless of the point you resolve them, with maybe Lovestruck Beast and Questing Beast as the top tier exceptions (both of these are notably worse than Syr Konrad, an uncommon that is basically a scopelessly unbeatable rare). They also largely weren’t the seven or eight cost bombs that win games but come at real situational costs. It’s just a bunch of three to six drop game enders in a format without a reliable way to race in the face of Food and tons of x/4 blockers. Losing to each of them felt the same and miserable. They drew their rare, they cast it at some point early or late, and you died horribly. Eldritch Moon and Hour of Devastation leaned heavily on this concept of scope, and even War of the Spark did that in the sense that each extra cost on a card represented a more than linear scaling of traction your opponent could amass to handle it.

I can’t help but wonder if some of this is the intersection of modern battlefield Magic design and generally pushing a set past the limits of what is reasonable for broad Constructed power level (you aren’t going to convince me Throne of Eldraine is in the healthy limits for Standard any time soon). Your broken cards are all limited hits and not Mox Opal or Aetherworks Marvel, and even past that you are just trimming mana and adding points to each card because “you have margin to make them exciting”.

I'm not saying that we want more Aetherworks Marvels. Just that the equivalently powerful "normal" or "fair" cards have chilling effects too. The depth of this issue is a completely different post of its own, but its impact on Limited is just one aspect of the power creep issue within Throne of Eldraine.

The Actual Problem with Oko, Thief of Crowns

Today, we get to talk about yet another problem with Oko, Thief of Crowns. If anything, it is the original problem with the card.

The one that when Oko was first revealed, everyone was buzzing about.

What is a Food token?

When I first started trying to write something about current Standard, the thing that came to mind was the idea of a forced or unforced error in design.

War of the Spark and Modern Horizons had their share of missteps, but each was a fairly resource straining and epic undertaking. They were also both working in totally new spaces. If you look at past Magic design mistakes, almost all of them are caused by trying new things and missing (Smuggler's Copter, Skullclamp, Jace, the Mind Sculptor), not being able to allocate enough resources to what is going on (True-Name Nemesis), or both (the Energy mechanic, the two sets I mentioned).

When you shoot high and strain resources in the hopes of putting out something awesome, there's an excusable level of failure. When you ban something like Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis, you know it's because they were shooting at making 250 cards matter and be great and one or three missed too high.

What was Throne of Eldraine's excuse?

I wrote an article titled The 10 Most Broken Cards in Throne of Eldraine last month. One of the cards I scored exceedingly high was Feasting Troll King.

I probably had some Hogaak on my mind biasing my rating upwards, but Feasting Troll King is an extremely powerful card. When first looking at the set it felt like there were a number of ways to generate Food at minimal mana or card cost. Basic cardboard economics show turning minimal investment into a 7/6 trample is good.

The follow up issue was that turning any investment into a 3/3 Elk was much less good.

When it was possible Oko, Thief of Crowns would be banned before Mythic Championship VI and SCGCon, I went back to thinking about Feasting Troll King. I looked at my decks, and remembered the experience I had playing them. Which was that Oko, Thief of Crowns was my best Food generator, and without it the easiest way to make a Feasting Troll King was tapping Castle Garenbrig to cast it.

Another common theme among Magic mistakes is a parasitic mechanic running out of control. The best recent example is Energy, though the classic is Affinity for Artifacts.

You print some cards that enable Energy. The pieces fit together and make all the other cards that do it better. Every more subtle interaction in the format now has to stack up to those obvious ones. You push the power level on some of the pieces, because if you don't you wasted a lot of cards that only work with each other.

If you don't push enough, you get Ixalan where the tribes barely made an impact. That might be an equally bad mistake on its own.

If you push too hard and don't print appropriate interaction to punish going all in on that one thing, you can easily end up in a scenario where that thing outclasses everything else.

But Energy didn't really go over the top without Rogue Refiner from Aether Revolt. And Vampires and Dinosaurs both got raised to highly competitive options with some targeted Magic 2020 buffs.

There won't be another Food card for Feasting Troll King for a long time. Maybe one can slide into Core Set 2021 if needed. There isn't a Hunt for the King or whatever a second Throne of Eldraine set would be. And if the mechanic was any more complicated than Food token, we might not see it until a Modern Horizons style set.

Throne of Eldraine is only the third true standalone set of this type in the Modern era. Dominaria was the first, and War of the Spark the second. Ravnica Allegiance and Guilds of Ravnica were set up in traditional Ravnica block fashion, where they don't expect any given mechanic to carry forward and all 10 guilds are the cohesive whole.

Dominaria and War of the Spark had linear mechanics, but they were open ended. Legendary or artifact stuff matters gets cards every set. Proliferate works with any counters.

Throne of Eldraine's first is being the first standalone set to support a parasitic mechanic.

From this idea of having one shot to make Food hit Standard play, the narrative of creating Oko, Thief of Crowns is easy. I'm not excusing missing the utterly stifling impact Oko's +1 has on deck building, but the rest falls into place,

You want Food to hit Standard. You are spending a planeswalker on it, and that planeswalker is one you are setting up as a prominent current and future antagonist. Even if Food misses, you want this card to hit. So numbers get pushed a bit to ensure it works by itself.

If you look at Simic "Food", the only real Food card is Wicked Wolf. Food as a mechanic has largely missed Constructed, we just see a lot of it from Oko and Gilded Goose. The failure case came true, and Oko "succeeded" at surviving that.

When you ban Oko, and that's a when not an if, you will see basically no Food. Even when Attune with Aether was banned, Energy showed up.

If you want another actionable, large scale design lesson from Oko, it is here.

Parasitic mechanics will be made again because they do new and interesting stuff. You have less cards to spend on them now that everything is single serving. How do you make them in a single set without having this issue again?

We have two existing models. I'm not sure either is optimal, but I present them anyways.

One came about after the Affinity fiasco. The Soulshift and Spirits mattering was a key part of Champions of Kamigawa block, and Ravnica: City of Guilds had plenty of Spirits to grow those synergies. You don't have to push and worry as hard if mechanics grow and change over time. That was repeatedly implemented block-to-block, but that now has to be woven in on a set-to-set basis. I'm unsure doing this is possible. You have general ideas of a block's mechanics early enough to seed it months or a year ahead, but not a single set. Throne of Eldraine feeds Theros Beyond Death's assumed  Devotion theme well, but War of the Spark and Magic 2020 didn't really feed Throne of Eldraine. Maybe this is another issue, since those sets and the Ravnica ones were so busy they didn't have space.

The other option is treating everything like an old small set. Mechanics become disposeable, you don't care a ton if they fail, and you don't go on Oko sized excursions pushing them. But that sucks, because everyone loved Constellation in Journey to Nyx and hated seeing nothing more of it.

Maybe standalone sets need to share mechanics. Maybe you need to break down the Core Set walls and have it serve a dual intro and supplementary purpose more. Maybe the 2 + 1 + Core model we saw in Ixalan + Dominaria or Guilds of Ravnica + War of the Spark is best since you can seed ahead of the standalone within the same year.

All I know is I really don't want to see the same thing that happened with Oko happen again.