Wizards of the Coast banned Oko, Thief of Crowns and Nexus of Fate in Magic: the Gathering’s Pioneer format this evening.
When they revealed Pioneer in October, Wizards decided to start with a small banned list that only included the five fetchlands printed in Khans of Tarkir. They said that they would “be watching [Pioneer] closely…and banning cards on off-cycle dates,” using data from Magic Online to identify problematic cards to ban early on.
In the two months since the format’s inception, Wizards has kept its word and made several sweeping bans, totaling nine additional banned cards after today’s announcement. Wizards says those bans have helped balance the Pioneer metagame, “with most of the top decks having a mix of favorable and unfavorable matchups against each other.”
“However,” they continued, “two decks proved to be outliers: Simic Food Ramp and Simic Nexus.”
Simic Ramp has been the clear best deck in Pioneer since the last ban, achieving a 60% non-mirror match win rate as well as winning twice as many leagues on Magic Online as any other archetype. According to Wizards’ data, the deck had favorable matchups against most of the other top decks in Pioneer while not having any extremely unfavorable matchups. In order to weaken the deck, as well as some of the other strong non-ramp strategies that could harm the Pioneer metagame long term, Wizards decided to ban Oko, Thief of Crowns because it alone “shores up many natural weaknesses of ramp decks.”
Pioneer Simic Nexus
| Creatures (1) 1 Brazen Borrower Planeswalkers (3) 3 Tamiyo, Collector of Tales Spells (28) 2 Fog 4 Opt 4 Censor 1 Cyclonic Rift 2 Growth Spiral 1 Haze of Pollen 2 Supreme Will 4 Hieroglyphic Illumination 4 Nexus of Fate 4 Dig Through Time Enchantments (4) 4 Wilderness Reclamation | Lands (24) 2 Blast Zone 4 Breeding Pool 3 Castle Vantress 3 Fabled Passage 3 Forest 2 Hinterland Harbor 6 Island 1 Lumbering Falls Sideboard (15) 2 Negate 2 Thing in the Ice 4 Lovestruck Beast 4 Mystical Dispute 3 Tireless Tracker |
Pioneer is just the latest format from which Oko, Thief of Crowns has been banned. He was initially banned from Brawl in early November, then from Standard a few weeks later, and got “suspended” from Historic last week.
Simic Nexus, on the other hand, was the second best-performing deck in Pioneer and had the second-highest league win rate in the format—after Simic Ramp, of course. Simic Ramp happened to be one of the deck’s worst matchups, so Wizards wanted to take preemptive action concert with the Oko ban to prevent Simic Nexus from dominating the metagame. As such, Wizards banned Nexus of Fate, noting that the card’s frustrating play patterns by locking opposing players out of taking another turn would have had a negative impact on the Pioneer format’s health.
Pioneer Simic Ramp
| Creatures (27) 3 Walking Ballista 3 Elvish Mystic 4 Gilded Goose 3 Llanowar Elves 4 Hydroid Krasis 2 Scavenging Ooze 4 Jadelight Ranger 4 Wicked Wolf Planeswalkers (8) 4 Oko, Thief of Crowns 4 Nissa, Who Shakes the World Artifacts (2) 2 Heart of Kiran | Lands (23) 4 Botanical Sanctum 4 Breeding Pool 1 Castle Garenbrig 8 Forest 4 Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx 2 Yavimaya Coast Sideboard (15) 2 Aether Gust 4 Negate 2 Aethersphere Harvester 2 Lifecrafter’s Bestiary 3 Lovestruck Beast 2 Reclamation Sage |
The next Pioneer Banned and Restricted announcement is scheduled for Monday, January 6, 2020, after which it will join the combined Banned and Restricted announcements used for each of Magic’s other competitive formats. The first premiere Magic event to feature the new Pioneer format will be a month later at Players Tour I on February 1, 2020.