Explanation of December 2010 B&R; Changes : Daily MTG : Magic: The Gathering

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Wizards of the Coast

Explanation of December 2010 B&R Changes

Erik Lauer

Monday, December 20, 2010

To see the changes, click here.

The DCI has made efforts to control the size of the banned & restricted lists, especially for eternal formats where banned cards never rotate out of the format. Standard, Extended, and Scars of Mirrodin Block Constructed each have no banned cards. The current Legacy banned list is shorter than the Legacy banned list when the format first debuted in its current form in 2004, and is equal in size to the shortest such list ever. Several thousand cards have been added to the format since then, and the percentage of the format that is on the banned list has plummeted. The current Vintage banned & restricted lists total to fewer cards than the lists had 10 years ago. Again, the percentage of the format that is on the banned list has fallen, to an all time low. While these lists may grow in the future, they have not been growing recently.

In recent months, Survival of the Fittest decks have been outperforming other decks in Legacy. This has caused the competitive format to become significantly less diverse. This has reached a point where the DCI concluded that it is appropriate to ban a card.

Other cards were considered, such as Vengevine. However some of the winning decks do not even play Vengevine; instead, they primarily rely on combinations with Necrotic Ooze. Also, Survival is a card that gives the decks a lot of resilience to potential answer cards. Some combination decks fail when they draw cards intended as answers to opponents’ decks instead of cards that are part of their winning combination. However, with Survival of the Fittest on the battlefield, a drawn Qasali Pridemage can be replaced with any other creature in the deck for one mana.

Time Spiral is unbanned to give the Legacy the potential for another deck. Time Spiral was overpowered in some formats. There are other reasons some cards are banned; some cards cause logistic problems for tournament organizers running large tournaments. For example, some cards cause so many matches to run out of time that it can cause a strain on judging and tournament organization, and even force tournaments to finish outside of the normal tournament venue. We identify such cards by whether they actually caused such problems when they were tournament-legal. Time Spiral did not cause such problems. In balance, the DCI believes the benefits of unbanning Time Spiral outweigh the risks.

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