This morning Wizards of the Coast banned Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath from Magic: the Gathering’s Standard format.
“We’ve been keeping a close eye on the emerging Zendikar Rising Standard format over its first week of availability on Magic: The Gathering Arena and Magic Online,” Wizards said. “With millions of games having already been played on digital platforms, early data and results from events this past weekend have shown that multicolor ramp decks featuring Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath, Lotus Cobra, and Omnath, Locus of Creation are a problem in the new post-rotation metagame.”
Uro has been the cornerstone of the Blue/Green-based ramp archetype that were often the most powerful decks in Standard, which already resulted in Standard bannings, ever since it was released in January with Theros: Beyond Death. But last week’s release of Zendikar Rising marked a rotation in the Standard format, with four sets—Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance, War of the Spark, and Core Set 2020—and their banned cards leaving Standard.
“[W]e wanted to allow the metagame to adapt…before making a decision on whether to let [Uro] remain a part of the environment going forward,” Wizards continued. However, “This weekend’s events underscored that the Four-Color Omnath decks are dominating early play, and that even the decks built to try to beat those decks utilized the powerful titan.”
At one of those events, the Star City Games Online Season 2 Championship, 24 of the Top 32 finishers (and six of the Top 8) played Four-Color Omnath.
Four-Color Omnath by tangrams (1st Place, SCG Online Season 2 Championship)
As a result, “In order to weaken these post-rotation ramp strategies, we’re choosing to ban Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath in Standard,” Wizards said. Rather than banning the archetype’s namesake card, which enables the deck’s most broken interactions, Wizards’ goal “is to bring these decks down to a level where they are still appealing and competitive, but where natural metagame forces are enough to keep them in check. In general, we prefer this approach to overshooting the mark and removing an archetype from viability.”
“However,” they added, “we’ve certainly noted this weekend’s strong results for the Four-Color Omnath deck and will continue to watch how that strategy and the overall metagame adjust in the coming weeks.
Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath joins the four cards already banned in Standard: Oko, Thief of Crowns, Fires of Invention, Once Upon a Time, and Cauldron Familiar. Nine cards were on the Standard ban list prior to rotation, which accompanied the release of Zendikar Rising this month. Five just “rotated” out of the ban list, and already one more has “rotated” in. Watch this space.