F.I.R.E—“fun, inviting, replayable, exciting”—is Magic’s motto as R&D burns down the old world order, Chandra-style. New sets used to be mostly draft chaff with a few splashy bombs pushed for constructed tournament play, like Snapcaster Mage and Dark Confidant. While this balance produced interactive limited environments and kept Type 2’s rotating power level from cascading out of control, persistent petitioners complained that eternal formats were in stasis.
Now, Wizards of the Coast is overloading current cards to trample over the vintage all-stars of Magic: the Gathering’s nearly 30-year history, and worried fans fear this may be the beloved game’s swan song.
For spellcasters new to “Do thing, draw card,” Magic was the original trading card game, designed by Richard Garfield, Ph.D. But the good doctor could never could have anticipated its success. Building, testing, and perfecting your own custom deck was rewarding, and the variance of opening hands and mana screw allowed even beginners to win, starting a lifelong cardboard addiction.
Garfield gambled on players only buying a starter deck and a couple of booster packs at most, maybe trading a Shivan Dragon for a Mox Sapphire and skipping town. Rarity restrained busted cards like Time Walk and Ancestral Recall by physically limiting the amount in the wild. No one could have foreseen that over twenty years later, players would be scavenging singles from the secondary market for thousands of dollars or going on the Internet and copying Chris Kvartek’s sideboard.
Magic morphed from bespectacled nerds in a basement casting Hippie off a Dark Ritual to an international phenomenon of livestreamed Pro Tours on Twitch with millions at stake. Developers had to walk a tightrope between Kamigawa, whose cards were soulful but useless, and Urza block, whose free spells snapped the game in half. Aside from brief mental missteps like Necropotence’s infamous “Black Summer” and Ravager Affinity, Magic was the undisputed monarch of TCGs.
“The problem isn’t that answers are bad; it’s that the threats are so good (and generate so much immediate value) that even if you can immediately answer them for just one or two mana, you’re still losing.” SaffronOlive
At its peak, professional play was about slowly grinding out as much value as possible—cracking fetches to thin your deck and shuffle a bad brainstorm, giving all your legal targets fear with Profane Command, next-level bluffing your opponent by casting Burning Wish for a card you forgot at home. Then, as the game grew more popular, Wizards pivoted from end of turn Fact or Fiction counterspell wars to creature combat, which was more comprehensible to casual players.
R&D realized that their most iconic angels and demons were basically unplayable in any serious match, contradicting the lore and disappointing Timmies who just wanted to summon big dudes. To prevent beatsticks from being repeatedly bounced back to their owner’s hand by Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Wizards gave creatures more enters-the-battlefield effects. This was the first grapeshot in an unwinnable arms race, as each threat had to be more lethal than the ones before, creating monstrosities like Questing Beast to fight even more powerful planeswalkers like Nissa, Who Shakes the World.
Recently, Teferi, Time Raveler; Oko, Thief of Crowns; and Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath were annihilating every format in the multiverse. “More Teferis than Rocky Movies, Time Raveler” singlehandedly shut down every control deck with his static effect for just three mana. Oko “Oops, all Elks” the Thief of Crowns could polymorph a $28,000 Black Lotus into a vanilla 3/3 for the final blow and bring shame to your opponent’s family on camera. “Uro, Titan of Card Advantage” was a three-for-one, finally letting you cast two explores without getting disqualified.
Instants like Veil of Summer broke the convention that adding “draw a card” to an existing spell usually cost one extra mana. Safety valves like Wasteland and Force of Will, which used to keep greedy decks honest, could barely hold the line in Legacy, and even old villains like Tarmogoyf were vanishing into memory.
Standard banned not only Oko but also Agent of Treachery, Veil of Summer, Field of the Dead, Once Upon a Time, and Fires of Invention. Such bans were unprecedented since Skullclamp, whose text reads “All of your creatures become Pot of Greed,” whatever that card does. The competitive scene glimpsed the unthinkable on May 18, 2020 as Lurrus of the Dream-Den got banned in Vintage, a fate formerly reserved for cards that restarted the game, required contests of manual dexterity, or promoted illegal gambling. And on June 1, companion as an entire mechanic was revised to cost three additional mana, not printed on the cards themselves. Later that month, even cards that saw no play in any format for decades got axed.
The real danger, however, is not these bans but the precedent they set: no card is safe from being cancelled. For Magic’s biggest fans, Wizards of the Coast is running out of time to put out this fire.
Source: MTG Goldfish, Can Standard Bant Beat Modern Jund?
