This is the first time ever that a card was banned in Legacy and I then had to look that card up because I wasn't 100% sure which one it was. Now, maybe it's a symptom of me not following the format as closely as I used to and maybe it's partially just because of the ridiculous pace of new set releases these days. But I don't think so. I think it's that there have been a bunch of new Eldrazi and that the general Legacy Eldrazi deck, while competitive, just isn't that egregious. But yeah, here's Sowing Mycospawn.
I've complained about Legacy bans a lot in the past, and I think rightfully so. But we're seeing a new pattern emerging when it comes to Legacy bans, and it's
so much worse than the old paradigm. When they banned Grief last August, they did so on the basis that it was too dominant. I contended at the time that this was being done with bad data. Garbage in, garbage out. But at least the justification was that Grief was too dominant. I thought that WotC were wrong about the facts they used to arrive at their conclusion, but if they were right about the facts, then the conclusion was warranted. Then came the announcement in December. They banned Psychic Frog and Vexing Bauble not because either card was dominating the format. Neither card was and they didn't claim that either card was. Dominance wasn't the issue at hand. The bans were instead motivated by WotC changing things up. They referred to data, but the data didn't really support anything until after they spun it into part of a complex analysis.
I was annoyed with the explanation for the Legacy bans in December, but this most recent explanation might be even worse.
Carmen Klomparens said:
By the numbers, the Legacy of today does a good job of emulating a balanced format.
Emulating? That's not possible. While we might agree or disagree as to what counts as a balanced format or whether Legacy is one, we ultimately each make our own assessment one way or another. Legacy is either balanced or it isn't. It can't "emulate" a balanced format. Evidently, Carmen Klomparens doesn't know what the word "emulate" means.
The most played deck, Dimir Reanimator, isn't taking too large of a piece of the pie, and the next handful of decks consistently showing up aren't doing so at clips that are wildly out of bounds.
Sounds like the format is ripe for an unbanning. There's plenty of chaff still on the list.
The issue is that, despite having several different decks, the format's slower macro-archetypes, like midrange and control, have largely been pushed out of the metagame as environmental pressures have wildly condensed the games.
Environmental pressures? I do not know what that means and I'm not convinced that Carmen Klomparens knows what it means either. It's been busted post-F.I.R.E. printings that have sped the format up. That's neither "environmental" nor "pressure."
But if you want to throw control decks a bone, you could always unban Mana Drain. I mean, at this point it would be too little, too late. But like I said, there's a lot that could be unbanned.
Further, player sentiment and event attendance has trended downward.
Yeah, your company has been sacrificing this format on the altar of the Reserved List for over a decade. Banning new cards won't make the old ones more accessible.
It's apparent to us that people who love to play Legacy do not love to play today's Legacy, so we're taking a couple of steps to try and improve the format.
Legacy started out with Goblin Recruiter, Hermit Druid, Metalworker, and Worldgorger Dragon all as banned creatures. None of those bans were really necessary. After several years, two of those were unbanned. The others should have gone as well. And for a
long time, at least no new creatures were being added to the ban list. Should have kept that up. There really aren't any creatures that need to be banned in this format. But in 2018, Deathrite Shaman was banned, and the floodgates were apparently opened.
Stop banning creatures in Legacy, WotC. It's silly.
Troll of Khazad-dûm has been a big part of Legacy for almost two years now, with some form of Dimir Reanimator being the strongest deck in the format since approximately the release of The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™. It has an extremely unique impact on deck building, allowing players to fill their deck with cards like Reanimate and Animate Dead without having to play a bunch of big creatures that might otherwise be dead cards in their hand or playing as many discard cards as possible to get big creatures into their graveyard. This subversion of opportunity costs has meant that Reanimator has been exceptional at playing a fair game while threatening an intensely unfair game for the better part of two years now. We believe that the Reanimator strategy is a core part of what makes Legacy feel like Legacy and is fun to have in the format. We've learned that the deck is more fun and less frustrating to play against when it must be a more committal synergy deck that isn't afforded the luxury of straddling the line between a tempo-y aggro deck and a combo deck. For that reason, Troll of Khazad-dûm is banned.
I strongly disagree with this and I don't appreciate Carmen Klomparens telling me what is and isn't fun. Reanimator as an archetype is at its most fun when it can find a proper balance between "cheating" on mana costs and deploying threats that it can reasonably hardcast. Awkward LotR name aside, Troll of Khazad-dûm is a good Magic card with a balanced design and is exactly the sort of thing I'd want to see in Reanimator. It has good synergy. And if I'm playing against Reanimator and I can't deal with a 6/5 creature, that's on me anyway.
Stop it. Stop banning creatures. And stop banning cards that you admit aren't actually a problem, just because you want to prune the metagame or whatever.
On the other side of format speed, Eldrazi and other colorless strategies have been prevalent in Legacy since they got a boost from Modern Horizons 3 last summer. Generally speaking, these decks have presented the issue of completely sidestepping the rules of engagement in the format, making them extremely hard to interact with. Last December, the strongest version of this strategy was using Vexing Bauble as insulation against cheap spell interaction for a fast combo, but now, colorless strategies have positioned themselves to have the best inevitability in the format, with a good chunk of that inevitability coming from a single card.
Sowing Mycospawn does it all in the context of colorless Eldrazi; it can grab late-game cards like Eye of Ugin and some interactive lands like Blast Zone or Karakas , but most frequently, it is grabbing copies of Wasteland to exacerbate the strength of its land-exiling effect. That land-exiling effect can notably target basic lands, which is a class of card that is more fun when it's a reliable out to other land-hating cards in the format like Wasteland and Blood Moon . Sowing Mycospawn is so good at attacking lands, often two at a time and even hitting basic lands, that it has caused environmental pressures on the format, compressing games to the first handful of turns and putting the Magic play experience at risk. For these environmental reasons, as well as the violation of format heuristics, Sowing Mycospawn is banned.
Yeah, I also strongly disagree with this take. If anything, the notable new inclusion that has really upgraded the Eldrazi archetype is Glaring Fleshraker. It's a whopping six mana to kick Sowing Mycospawn. Carmen Klomparens is exaggerating the land destruction capabilities of this card, which I contend has mostly been used by Eldrazi decks as a land-fetching toolbox at four mana, not as "I fetch Wasteland to blow up a nonbasic and I use the kicker to exile a basic" at six mana.
It's bizarre and troubling to see the "basic lands are sacred" conceit from casual EDH now being extended to Legacy. WotC, get the grubby paws of these maniacs out of Eternal formats. You're allowed to blow up basic lands. This isn't Modern and it isn't "Bracket 2 Commander." This is Legacy. This is where we blow up your manabase and laugh about it. No holds barred. Don't ban silly mushrooms.
In the coming weeks, we'll be keeping an eye on the prevalence and win rates of the various all-in combo and fast-mana decks that bubbled to the surface of Legacy. Blood Moon Stompy and Oops! All Spells are prime examples of decks that have seen their meta share rise in the past few months with the density of modal double-faced land cards in Modern Horizons 3, both currently within bounds of play rates and win rates that have been historically acceptable. Ideally, the above changes will create space for more counterplay against these decks over time.
I've probably declared Legacy "ruined" by these meddlers before, so I guess that this is more of the same. But I can't get over how stupid this is. I was excited when Mind's Desire was unbanned and thought that Legacy might finally be seeing a change in administration that could move things in the right direction. But it's been all downhill from there.
I wonder how long this current pattern will hold. I wouldn't be shocked to see this concept of "Legacy tournaments are dying so we'll ban two more cards from two different decks" a couple more times, but I also think that was probably played out before it even started.
