February 14, 2019 MTG Arena Banned/Restricted Announcement

Ferret

Moderator
Staff member
And thank god, for that! When combined with Teferi, it created a combo where you just sit back and watch your opponent do nothing - over and over and over again. A lot of those decks don't even have a win condition other than boring your opponent into conceding...
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
There's some concern I've seen expressed elsewhere, which I mostly agree with, that as Arena takes on greater importance, its logistical quirks and issues will negatively affect the rest of the game. This ban is the latest development and isn't inherently a problem. But the tone of the announcement is worrying. The bigger issue so far has been with the card Ajani's Pridemate...


It was first printed in 2010 and has been reprinted five times. It's been in three core sets. And all printed versions of the card so far share the same rules text. That rules text no longer matches the Oracle text of the card. And the reason for this is that the card is heavily played on Arena and the developers didn't like the way it worked there, repeatedly prompting players to ask if they did or didn't want to add a +1/+1 counter to the creature. There are very real situations in which it might be a wise decision to elect not to add a counter, but now that option is gone. WotC took functionality away from a popular, (relatively) old Magic card because its reprinting in M19 meant that it was part of Arena and they didn't like the way it was playing in Arena. If that sort of thing is going to be done more once Arena officially launches, then that's especially alarming. I'm always a bit put off when cards lose functionality, and moreso when it can be avoided. Sometimes the evolution of the game rules necessitates this. For instance, the changes with Sixth Edition rules meant that the old text on Lion's Eye Diamond would allow a player to announce a spell, then pay for it with mana from Lion's Eye Diamond. WotC felt that this new function gained made the card too powerful, so they gave it an awkward new rules text that limited it even more than it had ever been. But with the way the rules were changed to work, that couldn't be helped. But Ajani's Pridemate was a card that had absolutely no problems for nearly a decade and seemed to present no problems whatsoever. It lost functionality because it was a victim of Arena. It was the first, but I suspect that it won't be the last.

Obviously Nexus of Fate is a different animal. While I didn't really mind playing against the card on Arena (although the game really did handle it poorly), the card in general left me a bit annoyed because of how egregious it was as a stupid buy-a-box promo. Like so many others, I couldn't even get one because they were so heavily sharked by prospectors. I could buy it if I wanted to, but now that's not the point. It was insulting for WotC to do (functional) unique buy-a-box promos in the first place and I'm still irked about that whole debacle. But setting all that aside, my problem with the card on Arena isn't that it exists, but that the way WotC is handling this suggests some rather disappointing processes going on...
  1. They're really banking on Arena and they've made that clear, but even while the game is still in Beta, they're maintaining separate banned lists between Arena and tabletop Magic. If this is a one-time stopgap then the card will rotate out of Standard and the whole thing won't matter in the long run. But if this goes on, something's got to give.
  2. They're prioritizing "best of one" as the default way to play Magic on Arena. That's not limited to this announcement, but the announcement does cement the fact. There's been a lot of criticism of the use of best-of-one. Sideboarding has been a vital part of tournament Magic for a long, long time. For many Magic formats, maybe all of them, it'd be far more difficult to have a balanced environment without sideboarding.
  3. One of the issues cited with Nexus of Fate is "subpar viewing experiences." It boggles my mind that "viewing experience" is even a factor at all when it comes to anything about any card ever, let alone the decision to ban one. I mean, Magic isn't a spectator sport, right? Oh wait, I guess now it is. :(
  4. The treatment of this issue leaves me convinced that Arena will affect card design for new sets moving forward. I don't know how that will play out. Not necessarily saying that each new set will have some Arena inspector to veto card design choices, but I'd be shocked if there's not some influence already.
 

Ferret

Moderator
Staff member
Oh, how I hate the 'Pridemate (especially when combined with Ajani's Welcome!). But, thanks to a few tweaks I've put in my decks, it's not so much of a problem any more. To be honest, most white lifegain decks can't keep up with the damage I dole out with my aggro/mid-range decks... (not saying that I'm doing great, but I'm holding my own...)
 
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