Wizards of the Coast announced today that there will be a Banned and Restricted update to Magic: the Gathering’s Historic format next Monday, August 24.
Earlier this year, Wizards moved away from regularly-scheduled Banned and Restricted updates to as-needed updates. As part of that shift, they began to reveal the date of an update about a week ahead of time in order to give players about a heads up before any changes took place.
But today’s pre-announcement only gives players three days of notice and comes nearly three weeks after Wizards banned Wilderness Reclamation and suspended Teferi, Time Raveler (as well as cards in Standard and Pioneer) with no warning at all.
Wizards said at the time that, though they didn’t provide any advanced notice for those bans, it wasn’t “necessarily indicative of how we’ll announce and implement in the future, and we’re continuing to look at how we balance giving players advance notice versus staying agile with respect to changing metagames.” Today’s three-day warning appears to be an example of Wizards continuing to experiment with how they announce and implement bans.
While the surprise bans earlier this month came the day after the Pro Tour Finals, from which the top decks got banned, next Monday’s Banned and Restricted update to Historic will be announced two and a half weeks ahead of the next major Historic tournament: the Mythic Invitational. Given the current state of the Historic metagame, in which Field of the Dead is seen as the best deck, Monday’s update is likely to change the format significantly heading into the event.
“What’s the point of working on decks anymore, if you make a good one they’ll just ban it before the event,” tweeted Zachary Kiihne, who will be competing at the Invitational, after today’s announcement of upcoming changes. He also noted that he was caught off guard by the inconsistent schedule of Banned and Restricted updates, saying, “I [had] just decided the point where [Wizards] would ban something had passed so I went ham on” preparing both with and against Field of the Dead for the event.
Another popular target for a predicted ban in Historic is Muxus, Goblin Grandee. The card is a dominant force in Best-of-One Historic thanks to its ability to kill opponents out of nowhere as early as Turn 3, but is less of a threat in Best-of-Three—the format of the upcoming Invitational—since its combo is vulnerable to sideboard hate. Wizards has shown a willingness to ban cards in Best-of-One queues, while leaving them legal in Best-of-Three queues, as they did with Nexus of Fate in Best-of-One Standard last year. However, the recent addition of Thoughtseize to Historic in Amonkhet Remastered could be enough to disrupt the Muxus combo and justify Wizards letting it be.
Check back on Monday for all of our coverage of the Historic Banned and Restricted update and its potential impact on the upcoming Mythic Invitational.