Banned and Restricted update

It’s official, Oko is no longer a threat to none powered formats. No longer will he terrorise the battlefield, Elks everywhere, making every game gradually more and more tedious. He’s gone. End of. 

Well not end of actually because I still have to talk about him a little more to pad the article out. Oko wasn’t the only card to see the ban hammer this past Monday, Mox Opal and Mycosynth Lattice also bit the bullet and I can tell you, I agree with the majority of these decisions. 

Oko had to go, there’s no two ways about it. The fact that the power level of this Planeswalker wasn’t discovered in testing absolutely baffles me, couple that with the fact that he didn’t get banned sooner and you can colour me bamboozled. The three mana Planeswalker/powerhouse made games unfun and slow, be that playing with Oko or against him and that’s not what magic should be about. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be decisions involved because that’s what makes the game fun but Oko just slowed things down while you pondered whether to make a good or Elkify something and god forbid you ever actually used his ultimate. He was almost impossible to play around due to the versatility he presents and came down so early on in the game - as early as turn two in most cases - that the game could genuinely be over the second he hit the board. Good riddance and Wizards, get your act together.

Mycosynth Lattice is a flavoured card of mine, I play Esper Artifacts in commander and its a very useful card. In terms of tournament play, Mycosynth Lattice represented one thing in modern, “oops, I win.”. This all started with War of the Spark and the addition of Karn the Great Creator to the format allowing you to tutor Mycosynth Lattice from your sideboard of all places. With those two in play more than half the time you locked your opponent out of the game immediately. This again, isn’t fun. Stop gaps in a format are necessary but was just a bit much, even though Mycosynth Lattice didn’t really do anything on its own the jump in power when Karn was around was enough to cause the wrath of the ban hammer. 

Lastly, we have Mox Opal. Cards the with the word Mox in their name are always powerful, oh wait I forgot about Mox Tantalite... Cards with the word Mox on them are almost always powerful. Mox Opal has seen play in a fair few decks over its tenure in Modern and despite it being a 4 of in almost all of those decks I don’t think it was ever the most powerful card in any of them. It offered utility and mana fixing, sometimes a storm count but I’ve never found myself waitressing my opponent cast a Mox Opal and thought “the games over”. The only reason this Mox has seen the ban hammer is because of Urza decks in Modern, which begs he question: why not just ban Urza. This is a real sticking point for me because Urza is obviously a messed up magic card, that was apparent as soon as it got spoiled, but he’s not just messed up on his own - and he is messed up on his own. The power level of your deck significantly increases with Urza in play, this seems like synergy but the fact is if you can pay 2uu you get a free card, oh and you’ve got a construct friend to boot because why not. Wizards doesn’t want to admit that Modern Horizons was a mistake. That’s a bit of a broad statement and of course I mean certain cards in the set were a mistake but I also feel that the set premise itself was a mistake. Modern is already a none rotating format, that means it’s heavily reliant on two things: metagame shifts and the power creep of upcoming sets. Both of these things have been thrown out the window with Modern Horizons because it has caused the metagame to become very warped with a sudden extra influx of cards to for the format and specific to that format alone, and the powercreep is all over the place solely because Modern Horizons is a format specific set. Powercreep works because of the checks and balances system for standard released sets, - a set has a powerhouse card, the set after has the answer - with Modern Horizons skipping standard all together that becomes a non-entity and therefor skews everything somewhat. They admitted defeat on Hogaak and now it’s Urza’s time, Mox Opal has taken one for the team here. 

I think everyone was expecting Oko to be on the ban list and personally I was surprised not to see Urza on the list, but another card I thought may have kicked the bucket was Arcum’s Astrolabe. Another silly card from a silly set, Arcum’s Astrolabe has just warped the mana base of a lot of decks to Snow Basics. While this isn’t at all significant other than because of Arcum’s Astrolabe it has changed the cards people have to play to accommodate the one mana Artifact, that the definition of warping in magic’s context. Smoothing our your first draw is something that’s very powerful and therefor Arcum’s Astrolabe is showing up in everything. The real kicker is how good this is with Urza and that’s the real reason I thought it would be in the list but I guess I’ll have to wait until the next update. 

That’s been my look at the banned and restricted update, hopefully not too many of you got hit but unfortunately some of you did. My message to you is keep on keeping on...unless you played Oko, in which case get used to playing normal magic again lol.