Today, Wizards of The Coast released the latestBanned and Restrictedlist forMagic:The Gathering.While these lists are always contentious, players have been more upset than usual with how the recent list treated the Pioneer format. Specifically, players are frustrated that a certain combo wasn’t banned in Pioneer.
Magic: The Gatheringhas a number of different formats, each allowing you to play with certain pools of cards. For example players can play with any card ever printed in the Vintage format, while the Standard format only contains cards from the last year or so. Pioneer is somewhere in the middle of these two formats, allowing players to use cards that were printed any time between 2012 and the present day.
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WhenPioneer was first announced, many players were excited about new deck building possibilities. However, one deck has come to completely dominate the format. The deck is known as Inverter, as it based around combing off with a card called “Inverter of Truth.” InMagic, if there are no cards left in a players' library, and that player is forced to draw a card, they lose the game. However there are two cards, “Thassa’s Oracle,” and “Jace Wielder of Mysteries,” that say if a player draws a card when there are no cards left in the library, they win the game instead. The Inverter deck wins by using Inverter of Truth to reduce a players library down to nothing astonishingly fast, and then finishing the game with either the Oracle or Jace.
It’s hard to argue that Inverter decks aren’t the best decks in Pioneer. They are fast, efficient, and hard to interact with. Even players who don’t think the deck is the best, have to agree the deck is still meta warping. Every single deck has to be built with Inverter in mind. If a deck doesn’t have a way of stopping the Inverter combo, it isn’t even worth running, as it will certainly lose. It’s essentially eliminatedall forms of jank decksfrom competition entirely.
ManyMagicplayers were hoping that the latest ban list would remove some part of this combo from the game, making the combo either much harder or impossible to pull off. Wizards has alreadybanned one infinite combo out of the format, so players were hopeful. But it was not to be. Players across Reddit and Twitter have already started saying that they’re planning to drop the format, or that they’re happy they never bought into it, as this combo deck has become just too powerful to deal with.
Adding insult to injury, the only change to pioneer was the unbanning of the card “Oath of Nissa” a middling ramp spell.
