(Editor’s note: The original title of this article was “Cori-Steel Cutter, Abuelo’s Awakening, Monstrous Rage, and more Banned in Standard”)
This morning, Wizards of the Coast’s design team unveiled their “mid-year” banned and restricted update, also known as their “early rotation” window for Standard. If you were hoping for some significant changes to be made to the Standard format in the wake of Pro Tour Final Fantasy’s uniform meta environment which featured 140 Izzet Prowess decks (42.3% of the field) and 66 Azorius Omniscience decks (19.9% of the field). The Top 8 of the event featured four Mono-Red Aggro decks and four Izzet Prowess decks.
Change is coming.
A whopping seven cards found their way to the chopping block today covering not just the main culprits but also some of the other powerful decks in the format which might have warped the meta further in the absence of the Izzet and Azorius decks. Here’s the full list:
- Cori-Steel Cutter
- Abuelo’s Awakening
- Monstrous Rage
- Heartfire Hero
- Up the Beanstalk
- Hopeless Nightmare
- This Town Ain’t Big Enough
The first four changes very clearly hit the main problems in the format with the Mono-Red, Izzet, and Azorius decks that made up 74.1% of the entire Pro Tour format. The bottom three changes, while only making up decks with less than 10% of the Pro Tour meta, posed enough of a problem in a post-Cori-Steel Cutter environment that they’re also being banned alongside.
This is the first addition to the Standard banned list since May of 2023, and the largest Standard banning since March of 2005 when Affinity decks saw eight cards banned including the seven artifact lands, Disciple of the Vault, and Arcbound Ravager. The only other time seven cards were banned at the same time was the 1999 Combo Winter banning which saw Dream Halls, Earthcraft, Fluctuator, Lotus Petal, Recurring Nightmare, Time Spiral, and Memory Jar banned.
Jadine Klomparens, who wrote the Standard banning explainer, took care to address the future of the Standard format with respect to banning cards and format rotation. With the move to a three-year Standard, more care needs to be taken with cheap cards like Cori-Steel Cutter and Up the Beanstalk. The next format rotation won’t happen until January 2027 which means we’re likely to get some more cards banned from the most common format between now and then.
There were no other significant changes to any banned or restricted list. Cori-Steel Cutter was suspended in Alchemy pending a re-balancing of the card (something unique to Arena). Tibalt’s Trickery was removed from Pioneer Best-of-One (also unique to Arena). And Counterspell was unbanned in Historic (three-for-three on Arena-only changes).
The next update to the formats will be in late November.
(This article has been updated with historical context of the significance of these bannings)
Rich Stein (He/Him)Â has been covering Magic: the Gathering for Hipsters of the Coast since 2012