Metagame: A Fantasy Written in Red

Last week, we discussed the Standard Metagame and how the June 30 update will need to remove several key pieces if Wizards of the Coast's plan involves doing as little maintenance as possible to the format for the rest of the year.

While each example is explained in detail in the previous article, I can summarize my banlist takes in the following cards:

Monstrous Rage and Cori-Steel Cutter are commonplace now and don’t need much explanation at this point, but I believe that removing them won’t be enough to hold Mono Red back, and Heartfire Hero will eventually need to go because it’s too efficient with Manifold Mouse and pumps while punishing traditional removals that would handle it by dealing damage to the opponent.

Other cards also need little explanation: Up the Beanstalk will permanently benefit from any cost reduction and/or alternative costs while it’s legal in Standard, and it limits the creative space of the design team too much to avoid breaking it. Abuelo’s Awakening features a turn-four combo that wins games with or without Invasion of Arcavios — at that point, either it or Omniscience will have to go, and Abuelo is likely to get the upper hand, since Omniscience is in Foundations, Magic's 5-year rotation-proof set.

This Town Ain’t Big Enough arrived in Prowess lists and already had troublesome patterns with Bounce decks. The ability to reuse Stormchaser’s Talent and the Talent's second level to return This Town and perform loops is a bit too good for Standard, on top of the wide flexibility that the card currently allows.

Furthermore, bounce effects benefit greatly from the current Magic design philosophy where every card needs to be impactful in some way, which is often reflected in ETB effects. My current thesis is that the problem isn't exactly with cheap ETB effects, but with the mana efficiency of reusing them — Three mana to, for example, reuse Hopeless Nightmare creates fewer anti-game patterns and more response windows for the opponent, so it would be preferable for Nurturing Pixie to be the last one-mana card with this type of effect and leave Standard.

The notable exclusions involve two cards.

Stock Up was the most played card at the Pro Tour and one of the most important pieces in maintaining the breath and draw quality of Prowess decks and the ease of Omniscience in closing the combo. While it's a bit too close to Dig Through Time and a ban on it could be justified by the numbers, the biggest problem with taking it out of Standard is that it basically kills off Control decks, which only resurfaced in the format after Aetherdrift came out — there are reasons to consider a ban, but we'd be potentially killing off an entire macro-archetype for the mistakes of other decks that were broken for other reasons.

And then there's the new elephant in the room.

Vivi Ornitier is one of my favorite Final Fantasy characters. Seeing him at the Pro Tour competitive tables doing absurd things is a huge hype for a fan, but as a Magic player, I know when a card has patterns that, in one way or another, will lead to trouble.

During the various reviews we did on Final Fantasy, I highlighted that “Vivi Ornitier is the clostest to a Modern Horizons power level card in the set”, and it’s no wonder: Magic has dangerous precedents with anything that generates free mana with little effort and the FFIX mage fits this mold perfectly — all it takes is a few cheap cantrips, a pump, and the slightest bit of luck to untap with it, and we already have a deck ready to do something absurd.

In Standard, it was proven that, today, the format is not ready or lacks the tools to play around it, or is too focused on other tools to respond to it appropriately.

We’ve seen this play more times than we’d like: a player untaps with Vivi, casts Monstrous Rage, and magically he’s gained four extra mana on top of what he already had with their lands. If they have a cantrip, they can play it to sculpt their hand while dealing more damage to the opponent and increasing Vivi’s power.

In the end, this Monstrous Rage has already generated enough mana on its own to activate Stormchaser’s Talent to return some important spell, or even the Monstrous Rage itself used in the same turn, being recast again on Vivi for him, in addition to all noncombat damage he’s already dealt, go for ten or more damage in combat with Trample.

Monstrous Rage will likely be banned on June 30, but the same “four mana for one card” result can be easily achieved with Wild Ride and Turn Inside Out. Trample can make a difference in ending games, but turning a pump into an improved Dark Ritual is enough to make Vivi a long-term risk — it might be necessary to ban all payoffs or all enablers to avoid being broken in some way, or the card itself.

For example, this version can run Wild Ride as a pseudo-Dark Ritual to activate Roaring Furnace or Stormchaser’s Talent with little to no difficulty — if we'd like, we still have cards like Enter the Enigma or Might of the Meek to guarantee evasion while we draw more cards, and Vivi remains as resilient as in other versions.

Even if they decide to ban Stormchaser’s Talent, Vivi still has other powerful interactions in the format, simply by granting an ability that generates free mana. Creatures with +1/+1 counters on them become free mana sources with Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, as exemplified by the list rain by Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa at Pro Tour Final Fantasy —except for Voldaren Thrillseeker and Shivan Reef, the entire rest of the maindeck remains in the format after rotation, and +1/+1 counters are a common theme in many sets today and in the future.

So, do we ban Agatha’s Soul Cauldron as well to avoid breaking Vivi? If so, what other future interactions will we have with it? The mere reprint of a slightly better cantrip, or the release of a blue or red payoff that benefits from the extra mana and a deck based on non-creature spells, is enough to put it back on the threshold between acceptable or broken.

Vivi Ornitier is a three-mana card that requires deckbuilding concessions and dies to several different removals in the format while doing nothing on its own — but we've heard this story before.

“Dies to Doom Blade” has never been enough for many Magic cards. There was a time when everyone dismissed Sheoldred, the Apocalypse because it “died to removal and didn't provide value,” or even Cori-Steel Cutter was underrated because “we have Abrade and Temporary Lockdown in the format.”

Contrary to popular belief, the opponent doesn't always have a removal, or not every game is a Midrange matchup. Or worse: your opponent might have more important things to do than save to kill your creature, or you might save for Shore Up or some other removal, or maybe they needed to spend that interaction on a more important card.

However, it's still three mana. It's still a card that doesn't do anything on its own. If it weren't for Cori-Steel Cutter and Monstrous Rage, would Vivi still be considered a problem? Would we still have to focus too much on specific removals that don't interact as well against it? Or would the Metagame adapt to the point where taking resources from your opponent's hand to limit the number of interactions with Vivi is one option, or a Shoot the Sheriff saved for him is another?

Unless the Standard Metagame evolves into an environment with numbers and/or play patterns similar to what we saw with Nadu, Winged Wisdom in Modern—or if we have another Pro Tour with 40% share of an archetype that features it—it is unlikely that Vivi Ornitier will be banned in any capacity over the next six months.

It is one of the poster cards of Final Fantasy, Magic's most recent expansion and the most commercially successful set in history. No matter how you look at it, it is detrimental to the game if one of the most sought-after cards in the set is banned three weeks after release, and there are too many ban targets other than Vivi for it to leave the format now—even with the risk of breaking the Metagame again in the near future.

Take The One Ring for example. It was clear from the card's announcement that a pseudo-Time Walk + Ancestral Recall was already considerably strong for a four-mana colorless artifact. What many discovered shortly after the release of Lord of the Rings was that the fact that The One Ring was legendary was a benefit that allowed it to be sacrificed for another copy when it already had too many counters.

It took a year and a half from the release of LotR to the date of its ban. In that time, The One Ring became the most played card in Modern and even made it into Boros Energy, while being a staple of all Big Mana and practically making all Planeswalkrs obsolete.

Vivi Ornitier will never reach that point due to color restrictions, but we can expect interventions on it to take approximately six or more months to happen if they are necessary — until then, we will have countless discussions about the card. It is difficult to predict how it will behave in a world without Cori-Steel Cutter, if Astrologian’s Planisphere and Drake Hatcher will be enough backups, or if, in the end, the three mana in a more interactive and less go wide-oriented environment will put a target on its head that will make the most absurd plays we can make with it impossible.

The Pro Tour Final Fantasy was one of the worst I have ever watched. One thing I've always enjoyed about these tournaments is seeing the new things that players come up with, how the new cards fit into the Metagame, and of course, having diverse matches between different decks that give you ideas for what you want to build to play at your local store or on Magic Arena.

I still remember how the Pro Tour Gatecrash transformed the Aristocrats, a deck that ran Falkenrath Aristocrat and Cartel Aristocrat with the Humans shell and Lingering Souls of Innistrad, debuted its first big result and became an extremely popular archetype from that event onwards — this tournament didn't offer any of that.

There were often times when it seemed necessary to go way too down the brackets to find a match that didn't feel repetitive. It's absurd that a deck has 40% dominance in a major competitive event and two archetypes based on Monstrous Rage, all sharing the same theme, make up the entire Top 8 of the tournament.

While it didn’t reach “Pro Tour Nadu” levels of spectator misery, there are a dozen situations that could—and should—have been avoided with a more assertive ban window. It’s a shame that the most important Pro Tour of the year is remembered for the controversies surrounding cards that should have been banned before it, and so little is said about the very set we’re celebrating. At least with Nadu, we were discussing a card from Modern Horizons 3.

Our discussion today remains the same as it has been for the past few months: Monstrous Rage and the recent Cori-Steel Cutter. Except for Vivi Ornitier and perhaps Self-Destruct, none of the Final Fantasy cards have even gotten a chance to shine, and those only stand out because they’re in the dominant archetypes.

This might be a natural consequence of the three-year rotation. Perhaps fewer cards in each set will immediately impact Standard because the Metagame is broader and the amount of both competition and answers is so broad. On the other hand, this change in the nature of the format may also require more interventions.

Currently, Wizards avoids changing Standard too much unless it is really necessary to ensure the financial security in the format — the same reason why the three-year rotation was established — and thus ensure that more people are interested in investing in paper Standard, which has gone through a huge crisis in the post-pandemic world.

In addition to financial security, however, the format needs to be interesting. And while some may, yes, like a scenario of Monstrous Rage, Omniscience and Cori-Steel Cutter, what the numbers show is that the environment is saturated as several strategies cannot succeed in an environment so focused on the lack of interaction.

Having some unfair plays, while far from ideal, is common, and happens with any format, but having them exist in over 70% of the decks represented at its highest-level event of the season is a bit much. Even if the company doesn't want to change Standard every three months because it wants to see the format adapt to new sets, or to ensure the financial security of players, a year is proving to be too long for its health — more interventions are needed, and more frequent maintenance.

These maintenances need to be assertive. Six months ago, Cori-Steel Cutter wouldn't have existed, and the absence of Monstrous Rage probably wouldn't have taken away from Izzet Prowess' status as the best deck in Standard at launch, but the artifact case is, technically, one of those "exceptions" that Wizards refers to when it says it wants to change the format as little as possible.

Six months ago, we were facing Monstrous Rage and This Town Ain’t Big Enough while Azorius Omniscience was still in its early stages of becoming a competitive deck, and we probably wouldn’t have avoided the dominance of the Prowess-Red Aggro-Omniscience triad. If these interventions we expect on June 30th had come out before Final Fantasy’s release, what we would have had at this event would have been the first steps towards seeing how the post-rotation metagame will shape up, or the grand departure of some well-established decks from the format — it would have been a much more interesting Pro Tour to watch than the one we saw last weekend.

Maybe six months is the ideal time to fix the format, while cases like Cori-Steel Cutter should be addressed as what they are: a design mistake. No matter how hard they try, a company cannot and will not please all of its audience; there is a need to discern what really needs to leave the environment and what people just don't enjoy playing against, but if the environment is uninteresting or too restrictive, Standard loses anyway. Players lose interest.

When a player buys a card, they are taking the risk and are aware of what that purchase could mean if the deck is dominant. It's better for Magic's public image that this player needs to rethink ways to use Cori-Steel in other formats than for the most important Pro Tour of the year to be flooded with 42% of the same deck because of this same Cori-Steel.

What makes Standard an interesting format is the possibility of innovating and playing with new cards in the most efficient way. And even when this is cut, Magic knows and has always known what is the biggest motivator for its audience to play a format: creating a competitive scene with it at the center. That's how you revitalize any environment.

While all this mess is happening in defense of "financial health" and supposed stability, I still wonder what happened to the best possible entry point that Standard can have: Challenger Decks.

Thanks for reading!