Wizards of the Coast has banned Oko, Thief of Crowns, Once Upon a Time, and Veil of Summer in Magic: the Gathering’s Historic format, while lifting the suspension of Field of the Dead. They also banned Golos, Tireless Pilgrim in Brawl.
Don’t miss our coverage of today’s other bannings—or lack thereof—in Modern and Legacy as well as Pioneer.
Historic Bannings
All four cards were “suspended” from Historic in December. At the time, Wizards said that suspending a card is different from banning it in the sense that suspension isn’t seen as a permanent solution. “For gameplay purposes, a suspension works like a ban, in that the card will not be legal to use in the format while it is suspended,” Wizards said in the December announcement. “But unlike how we handle banning cards, we plan to use the flexibility that the digital format provides to move cards onto and off of the suspension list more commonly.”
Three months later, Wizards has decided the fate of the four suspended cards. Thanks to the digital-first nature of the Historic format, which allows cards to be added through Historic Anthologies, they have been able to provide additional answers to Field of the Dead like Ghost Quarter and Goblin Ruinblaster. “With these new options and other decks picking up powerful additions, we’re optimistic that we can reintroduce Field of the Dead without decks that use it becoming dominant,” Wizards said. The card’s suspension has thus been lifted, making it legal in the Historic format once again.
Oko, Thief of Crowns, Once Upon a Time, and Veil of Summer, on the other hand, are still too powerful in large part because they “are difficult to interact with in an advantageous way,” Wizards said. “After observing the health of the format with and without these cards, we’ve decided to upgrade the suspensions to bans.”
Once Upon a Time joins Oko, Thief of Crowns as the second card from the Throne of Eldraine expansion to be banned in four competitive formats—Standard, Historic, Pioneer, and Modern—in less than six months after their release in October 2019. Veil of Summer, which was also a part of Throne of Eldraine, has been banned in Standard, Historic, and Pioneer but remains legal in Modern.
Golos, Tireless Pilgrim Banned in Brawl
Wizards also announced that it had banned Golos, Tireless Pilgrim in the Standard singleton Brawl format.
“In Brawl play on Arena, decks using Golos, Tireless Pilgrim as their commander have risen to become about 10% of the field,” Wizards said. “This makes Golos twice as popular as the next most popular Brawl commander. While this isn’t inherently problematic, Golos’s five-color identity also circumvents deck-building restrictions that most other Brawl decks need to work within.”
When combined with Golos’s ability enter the battlefield ability to “tutor for specific lands which can, among other things, help pay for future commander taxes,” which “reduces variety of gameplay in a way that’s inconsistent with the spirit of a singleton format,” Wizards believes that the card does not belong in Brawl.
Golos, Tireless Pilgrim joins Sorcerous Spyglass and Oko, Thief of Crowns as the three total cards on the Brawl banned list. (Yes, that means Oko is banned in a total of five formats.)