MTG: Magic’s New Banned And Restricted Massacres Meathook Massacre
Magic: the Gathering’s new banned and restricted announcement takes Meathook Massacre and Yorion, Sky Nomad out of the pool.
October’s Banned and Restricted announcement has come down from up on high. As is often the case, Standard and Modern are typically better for it. Especially since this time, the announcement targets only two cards.
The Meathook Massacre and Yorion, Sky Nomad are both on the banned list for Standard and Modern, respectively. This comes after the release of Dominaria United had a chance to shake up the state of play. And two cards rose to the top. Here’s the official announcement.
Magic: the Gathering Banned and Restricted – The Meathook Massacre and Yorion, Sky Nomad
In a nutshell, these are bans meant to keep the format healthy. Making sure that no one color dominates all others, which was the case with the Meathook Massacre:
As Standard has settled into place, the color black has proven powerful and prolific, and makes up the foundation of many of the top decks. Despite that commonly shared color, we’re seeing good diversity among competitive decks and strategies, and player engagement with the format has been healthy.
To provide a small push against the color black’s play rate among competitive decks, we’re choosing to ban one black card. We discussed several different options, as no single black card stood out as a major power outlier played by all decks containing black. Ultimately, we decided that banning The Meathook Massacre was the best choice, as it’s one of the most powerful black cards in the format, is especially powerful against specific archetypes (decks relying on a lot of small creatures), and has had its time to shine in Standard for over a year.
Yorion most commonly appears as a companion in Four-Color Omnath decks, which show a strong win rate and, according to our matchup data, are likely to continue to rise in popularity. In addition to game-balance concerns with the deck, we’re also factoring in the physical dexterity requirements of playing with a large deck for tabletop. We’re wary of the metagame reaching a point where players are playing the deck because of its perceived strength and win rate despite not enjoying how cumbersome it can be to operate.
While these physical dexterity issues exist to a lesser degree in other formats (like Pioneer), Modern specifically entails more shuffling and other physical card manipulation because of the deep card pool of card-selection spells, fetch lands, and so on. Cards encouraging large decks, like Battle of Wits, have existed in the past, but usually on the fringes of competitive play rather than as one of the strongest decks.
Read the full announcement here
