MTG: Winota Banned In Pioneer Too, Now
A new banned and restricted announcement takes Winota, Joiner of Forces out of yet another format. See who else is on the block.
WotC made a new banned and restricted announcement earlier today. And Winota, Joiner of Forces is top of the list. With good reason too.
Winota can quickly lead to boards that spiral out of control. She’s been topping the deck lists and quashing the meta, but Pioneer will have a little more breathing room now. Joining her is Expressive Iteration.
WotC Banned And Restricted Announcement – Winota And Expressive Iteration
Both Magic: The Gathering cards added to the banned list today take the idea of advantage and run with it. Aggressive decks using Winota can run away with a win early on. And similarly, archetypes making use of Expressive Iteration take card advantage to the extreme. These two cards aren’t just good, they’re dominating the format. Winota has been, in WorC’s own words, suppressing diversity:
Over time, it has become clear that Naya Winota is suppressing diversity as its power and consistency have drastically reduced incentives to play other linear creature-based strategies. Not only is it a resilient midrange deck that can leverage many of the powerful mana creatures available in the format, but its explosive draws involving the deck’s namesake can create unassailable battlefield states as quickly as turn three.
Winota’s ban for Explorer continues. And it looks like it will continue for a while. WotC, as promised, revisited their decision, and decided it remained a good one.
As far as Expressive Iteration goes, yeah, obviously WotC was gonna ban the most powerful card advantage card they’ve had in a while:
Expressive Iteration has been a multiformat all-star since its release in Strixhaven: School of Mages. It has fueled a variety of highly successful Izzet Strategies in Pioneer by both providing card selection and card advantage at a much higher rate than what is available to other decks, making it extremely difficult for other strategies to engage them in wars of attrition.
Iteration is banned in Explorer and Pioneer. WotC also opened up more about the formats where no bans were applied.
While we’re choosing to make changes only to the Pioneer banned list at this time, we did examine and discuss the health of each of our competitive play formats. For each of those other formats, we found the metagames to be in a generally healthy state, characterized by moderate play rates and win rates among the most played decks, and good variety of choice among competitively viable decks.
You can see a full summary of their reasons in the full announcement.
What do you think of the changes?
