Wizards of the Coast has banned Thassa’s Oracle in Magic: the Gathering’s Historic format.
“While Thassa’s Oracle is a powerful card that has created combo decks across multiple formats, until recently, it wasn’t a force to be reckoned with in Historic,” Wizards said. “However, with the recent printing of Tainted Pact and the fine-tuning of that archetype, we’ve seen the rise of the two-card combo in Historic to the point that half the field for the past League Weekend utilized the combo.”
“Due to the power of the two-card combination, and because we expect that Thassa’s Oracle is likely to cause problems down the road as Historic continues to add new cards, Thassa’s Oracle is banned in Historic,” they concluded.
Thassa’s Oracle has been a key card in a few different combo decks since it was released in Theros Beyond Death. It broke through in the first major Pioneer tournament, Players Tour 1, in combination with Inverter of Truth as a part of the Dimir Inverter deck. The combination proved too powerful for Pioneer and resulted in the banning of Inverter of Truth.
But it only recently began making waves in Historic with the addition of Tainted Pact to the format via Strixhaven, which was officially released on April 23. Tainted Pact was included as part of the set’s Mystical Archive, which made the card legal in Historic because every Mystical Archive cards was added to MTG Arena. Players quickly realized that you could build a deck full of one-ofs in order to allow Tainted Pact to mill your entire deck and win with the enters the battlefield trigger on Thassa’s Oracle.
Seven Mystical Archive cards were banned from Historic before their release—Channel, Counterspell, Dark Ritual, Demonic Tutor, Lightning Bolt, Natural Order, and Swords to Plowshares—and Tainted Pact appears to be the first card from the Mystical Archive to to directly result in a card other than itself getting banned in the format.