Modern: 6 cards that could be unbanned (and 6 cards that can't)

In the last few days, due to a Twitter post by Andrea Mengucci regarding the Modern banlist, discussions about unbans in the format started to form in the most diverse social networks, so how about we talk a bit about the format's current state, and what cards we could add to it?

The first thing we need to consider is how Modern is currently behaving, and I think it's in a very diverse moment if we consider the representation numbers, and the winrate of the archetypes seems to fluctuate as other decks prepare better against them, creating a space where we have more than a dozen viable strategies in the competitive scene.

What we do have, however, are some archetypes that make the game experience unpleasant - a matter of personal taste from one player to another and, commonly, without much grounding in numbers - After all, no one likes to deal with a Karn Liberated on turn 3, or lose a matchup because the opponent made the perfect Hammer Time streak.

In my case, I simply can't enjoy playing against Four-Color Goodstuff, or Four-Color Piles as that archetype makes the games a bit miserable and its deckbuilding proposal is something I don't actually see as healthy: a stack of the best cards available in the format, rewarded for piling up your list to over 60 cards through the most powerful companion Modern has to offer.

Normally, this deck category should be punished by Blood Moon for having such a greedy manabase, but Abundant Growth, Utopia Sprawl and good knowledge and timing of how to use their fetchlands allow the player to remove all utility from the strongest manabase hoser Modern has ever had — not to mention that the search for a basic Forest, for example, is enough to channel Boseiju, Who Endures and proceed with your gameplan as normal, or access to three colors with two basic lands (a Plains and a Forest) makes Blood Moon a target for Prismatic Ending.

Due to this redundancy in dealing with targeted hate and because it's basically a "value tower" with no deckbuilding restrictions, I don't really see Four-Color Piles as necessarily good for Modern in the long run, since it will only stay more powerful as more bombs and combos come out, and a “perfect” manabase limits the space for other value-town categories that could exist without these Goodstuff Decks.

But that's just a private opinion on one of Modern's most played archetypes — a personal distaste for a strategy, in the same way that many players probably don't like playing against some of my favorite decks either, like Izzet Murktide, Death's Shadow or Hammer Time — and therefore should be treated as such.

After all, this is not an article about banning cards, but about the possibility of unbanning some dated pieces on the banlist and/or that were placed there for the wrong reasons.

Before we start, I would like to point out that this text is not exactly a request for unbans, but an exercise in how I see Modern today and what seems safe or not to unban in the current moment - and that might change swiftly as new sets comes out.

Bridge from Below

Honestly, I have a huge dislike for Bridge from Below because absolutely everything about it is totally opposite to what a Magic card should do: it doesn't really work according to the game's patterns, it works only by being in your graveyard, it creates tokens if you kill your creatures, and it's only exiled if one of your opponent's creatures dies — absolutely nothing on it makes sense.

However, we need to be fair and admit that Bridge from Below was banned for Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis' sins and its departure significantly worsened archetypes such as Dredge, while BridgeVine, a deck whose base gave space to Hogaak as we knew it, has simply ceased to exist and doesn't even have the means to operate as it used to before Modern Horizons.

While possibly proving to be a problematic effect on the format in a future where new graveyard interactions appear, Bridge from Below has left many players orphaned and made some archetypes worse, and with Dredge and other graveyard-focused strategies low today, I think its unbanning could give them a boost and move the Metagame a bit.

Hypergenesis

At this point, I don't even know why Hypergenesis is banned from Modern: Its interaction with Cascade is definitely powerful, but other archetypes with this strategy — where the targets are Crashing Footfalls and Living End — seem to be far better options as they require fewer deckbuilding concessions and run fewer dead cards, which is the main reason these Cascade variants succeed in Modern today.

To build a deck around Hypergenesis, the player would need a Cascade base (probably the same as Temur Footfalls), with the addition of some bombs (most likely Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and/or Griselbrand), severely hampering accurate execution of your game plan when drawing multiple copies of this unhelpful piece — and if you bet on complementary stuff like Through the Breach, you'd be forcing yourself to use counterproductive cards with just to make a bad piece of your list (Hypergenesis) better.

And if we look at the fairer spectrum of building this archetype, like trying to harness utility creatures with powerful ETBs like the Evoke cycle from Modern Horizons II, then wouldn't we be piloting a worse version of Living End and Crashing Footfalls since Hypergenesis does absolutely nothing on its own, not to mention that the Glimpse of Tomorrow variants are better at this function as well?

Finally, without Simian Spirit Guide and good rituals, players can no longer cast Hypergenesis on turn 2 unless they get lucky with Gemstone Caverns, while we have much more efficient answers to it today, such as Force of Negation and Flusterstorm, as well as means to prevent the combo with Containment Priest and the like.

Tibalt's Trickery

Following the same pattern as above, we have Tibalt's Trickery.

I wouldn't want Tibalt's Trickery to be unbanned because it adopts an anti-game strategy, but I agree that its presence on the banlist doesn't make much sense if we consider that the "free-win" factor has always existed in Modern and by far more efficient means than with a lottery spell like this Instant: If you want consistency, you'd need a list that has four Cascade spells (probably, Throes of Chaos), four Tibalt's Trickery, a few copies of Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and a dozen lands, and you'd have to give a lot of Mulligans to find the right pieces while hoping the opponent doesn't have any answer when you try to execute the combo, or your plans would be ruined, plus it's extremely easy to sideboard against you.

Therefore, I believe that time would make its natural selection on Tibalt's Trickery in the format, making it just a meme that would never achieve a relevant result in the competitive scenario, and that would hardly be worth playing in tournaments and/or in Leagues and Challenges due to their low consistency, unpredictability and inaction in post-sideboard games.

Also, as already mentioned, Simian Spirit Guide is banned, making combos with Tibalt's Trickery slower, less consistent, and more passive to every interaction category.

Blazing Shoal

Still following in the combo category (and I swear I don't really enjoy playing with non-interactive lists), Blazing Shoal was one of the first cards to be banned from Modern after a few tournaments for adding too much consistency to Infect, back when these lists had this spell with some 9-mana bomb, such as Progenitus or Dragonstorm, to give +9/+0 to a creature with Infect, dealing lethal damage as early as turn 2.

However, that ban is a decade old and the format (or Magic as a whole) has changed a lot since then: we have better interactions, cantrips have been banned, and several other strategies achieve potential quick kills with combos while adopting a Grind strategy that allows them to play a fair game — something Infect would never do as most of its creatures will only be good if they're functioning as combo pieces while we're also forcing bad pieces, like spells that will never be cast, just to make the combo work, something that often defines whether a combo is good or bad in the competitive Metagame.

We can't also disregard that Infect currently manages to perform turn 2 kills and without resorting to bad cards through Scale Up and Might of Old Krosa, and that doesn't make it one of the top tiers on the current Metagame and appears only occasionally in Challenges and Leagues. The same would definitely happen with Blazing Shoal versions.

Seething Song

Probably the second most dangerous card on my unban list is Seething Song since I can't accurately measure where it would be so absurd in the current Metagame, but it does make known strategies, like Storm or Belcher more consistent — and considering how low these archetypes are today, I think giving that slight push would increase the diversity of the format and if they became too powerful, it wouldn't be a problem to ban Seething Song again to fix the format.

While I agree that paying too little mana to add more mana is extremely powerful in Modern, paying too much mana to add more, as in the case of Seething Song — three mana is a lot in Modern today — doesn't seem to bring what is needed to break the format again: Belcher resorts to Irencrag Feat for four mana to cast and activate Goblin Charbelcher, although Storm worries me a bit.

Green Sun's Zenith

Like Seething Song, I suppose Green Sun's Zenith could go into the unban category where they can go back if it got too troublesome, and it's worth noting that this happened with Golgari Grave-Troll.

While the quality of green creatures has increased significantly in recent years, the color diversity on threats has also increased, as have creature tutors like Eladamri's Call and Eldritch Evolution that work at Instant-Speed ​​and/or works best with the theme of the archetype they fit, and it would be quite interesting to see how far Green Sun's Zenith would go in Modern today and what archetypes it could bring back and/or reinforce in the format.

If we look at Legacy today, we see that it appears especially in combo lists like Selesnya Depths and Elves, or in Midranges looking to extend the game like Nic Fit and Four-Color Zenith. In Modern, in addition to the obvious inclusion on Elves (which is not a competitive option right now), we would probably see some Four-Color variant based on green creatures, not to mention the possibility of expanding archetypes like Devoted Druid — despite considering that Eladamri's Call is more important on its lists.

We also have more interesting search options in other colors that this spell can't find since they're not green creatures, greatly limiting your deck building space, in addition to requiring a high investment of mana that can, today, be answered with Counterspell and other more efficient spells in terms of mana that the total cost paid needs to be relevant.

I confess that of all the cards on my unban list, Green Sun's Zenith is the most dangerous and the one I have doubts that should be in that category — but it's also the one that would make me most interested in seeing its real impact … And what would I most hope for, a quick intervention if it becomes too oppressive.

There are countless cards that we would love to be able to use again in Modern, but which I believe unbanning would not be healthy or useful for the general Metagame — no matter how harmless they seem.

Ponder & Preordain

You know what would be even worse than making format combos more consistent by unbanning cantrips? Make the entire Blue-Based archetypes much more consistent than they already are.

As a regular Izzet Murktide player (I even made an extensive guide for this deck and you can check it out here), I'm pretty confident that adding Ponder and Preordain would make it and other blue archetypes as prevalent as they are in Legacy without even needing Force of Will or Daze — and it would be even worse if we had these unbans while Expressive Iteration is still legal.

The absence of Ponder and Preordain in Modern today not only serves to ensure consistency in combos, but also to increase the viability of non-blue decks and prevent the format from becoming a Blue-Based vs. Combo format.

Field of the Dead

I put Field of the Dead in my private ranking of “cards that should never have been printed” (maybe one day I'll publish an article about it) because it is a parasitic permanent from which absolutely nothing good will ever really come out of it, and I can't imagine a Metagame where its inclusion is really healthy since the main archetypes that would take advantage of it are Four-Color Piles and Amulet Titan, and that removes the natural weakness of both on different spectrums.

The best way to beat Amulet Titan today is to be faster — either with combos or beatdown — and removing the latter by including Field of the Dead in a list that, naturally, already has an absurd amount of lands with different names and still adopting a more consistent aggressive plan to an already very well established combo in the format seems like a bad idea.

The Four-Color Piles is another archetype that naturally draws on several different named lands to compose its manabase and adds an inevitability with something that speeds up their clock absurdly alongside Fetchlands and seems more like a way to worsen it, as well as resolving the issue of this archetype taking too long to win the game.

Umezawa's Jitte & Punishing Fire

Umezawa's Jitte is banned for limiting the space of aggressive archetypes in the format, and with Stoneforge Mystic unbanned and present in some main decks today — in addition to the natural balance that fast aggressive decks are needed to face Big Mana — I think its unban would be bad for Modern under any circumstances right now.

I will also mention Punishing Fire here because it follows the same pattern, although there are advantages in its departure from the banlist, after all it is a recurring way of dealing with Planeswalkers, and the fact that the main decks that would take advantage of it are precisely those who need to play high, like the aforementioned Four-Color Piles, and that it would heavily punish strategies that try to play low means slowing down many aggressive archetypes and favoring value-based strategies.

Splinter Twin

Believe me, few people want Splinter Twin unbanned as much as I do, I was around when it was legal in Modern and loved playing the deck whenever I could, but I have to admit that maybe now is not the ideal moment.

Modern, as a format, has changed a lot since 2016 — particularly in terms of flexibility and power level — and I'm pretty sure Izzet Twin wouldn't be as powerful or reduce the diversity of the format as it supposedly did at the time its centerpiece was banned... But it's not on Izzet that you'd build a Splinter Twin today, but on another variant of the Four-Color Goodstuff stacks — one that would now have the threat of a combo-kill every turn from turn 3 onwards while playing a way better fair game than any Twin variant has ever had.

So while there is a possibility to easily put any piece in a Goodstuff archetype and solve the problem, whether it's a four-color or even Jeskai (with this one being quite attractive, since we could mix Stoneforge Mystic with Pestermite and Teferi, Time Raveler), the Izzet Twin and other variants would have no room in the competitive landscape to outplay the other variants because they would be poor options in a direct comparison.

That is, while Splinter Twin conforms to Modern standards today and is likely to be a safe unban, it would mostly be an extra -and far too threatening - wincondition for Goodstuff decks.

At the end of this article, I would like to emphasize again that this text is not exactly a request for unbans, but an exercise in relation to how I see Modern today and what seems safe or not to unban in the current scenario of the format.

Although I've mentioned several times how some cards can't get out of the banlist because of Four-Color Piles, I also don't dare say that any deck needs bans today as long as the format is diverse and there are viable strategies for every kind of player. It was just realizations that many of them are simply better in Four-Color Piles than they would have been in their old decks.

In a general context, I really believe that Modern is healthy and doesn't need direct interventions to keep it that way. But, if at some point we need to shake up the Metagame a little more, removing some cards from the banlist could be an option in this objective, and my suggestions are those that, I believe, are safe enough not to break the format again.

Thanks for reading!