Metagame: First Impressions of the June 30th Bans

After a long wait for the Banned and Restricted update, Standard woke up at the end of June with seven fewer cards in the format:

With this update, Wizards anticipated the effects of the rotation while addressing several issues from recent months: the predominance of Red decks, the excess value caused by Bounce and Up the Beanstalk effects, and also the lack of more interactive games due to the Omniscience combo.

In addition to these changes, the company also announced that 2026 will have two maintenances in Standard during the year, which is a great window compared to what we saw during 2025. Troublesome environments like the one this year offered need to be addressed more assertively, while also not overdoing it due to social media demands — a six-month window provides exactly that opportunity, making Standard exciting without making it too fickle.

The next few weeks will be a peculiar time for players, where we will be exploring new possibilities now that the format's foundations and general rules have been demolished to create a new status quo of what works and what doesn't in the Metagame.

I believe that almost all the bans are very obvious to those who have followed Standard throughout the year. Pro Tour Final Fantasy has solidified the results that have been seen in both small and large-scale tournaments over the past few months to the point where there has been enough time to gather data and build statistical groundwork to justify each of these.

Abuelo’s Awakening

The Omniscience combo is virtually dead without Abuelo’s Awakening. Cards like Yuna, Hope of Spira will likely be the next step in trying to reanimate the enchantment and start looping, but at this point, it seems more beneficial to bring Summon: Knights of Round or any Overlord back rather than waiting an entire turn cycle to win the game — this is a trait it will share with what is now Domain Overlords, segmenting itself between traditional ramp lists and those that will try to “combo” with discard and mill effects to bring back expensive enchantments.

Monstrous Rage and Heartfire Hero

The most affected for practical purposes, but not dead, is Mono Red. Monstrous Rage was an obvious ban, and it was clear that it alone would not be enough. Over the past few months, we've pointed out two viable options to improve the format's speed issues: Heartfire Hero, whose interaction with pumps and Manifold Mouse won games too quickly and punished cheap removals, and Screaming Nemesis, whose ability to lock in life gain for the rest of the game is detrimental to one of the main counterplays against Aggro — Wizards opted for the former.

Without Hero, Mono Red Mice as we know it ceases to exist. It's possible to play with it, but Manifold Mouse loses a lot of its potential without a quality one-drop, and we don't have a one-mana red mouse besides the new banned card. The likely route at first will be to give up the Mice package in favor of a Prowess or Go Wide Aggro plan.

In the first case, Monastery Swiftspear and Cacophony Scamp provide a good glue until the rotation, but the archetype will need to redefine itself again with Edge of Eternities, perhaps without many ways to keep the plan solid and consistent enough, or betting more on Burn spells to enable Ghitu Lavarunner.

In the go wide plan, cheap non-creature spells are abandoned in favor of more permanent power on the board. In this case, the archetype would need to be completely revamped and would be noticeably different from the version we know today and closer to the one we saw last season.

For the mouse package, perhaps the best route is to go for Boros, with Flowerfoot Swordmaster as a one-drop and gaining enchantments like Sheltered by Ghosts. In these cases, an interesting possibility is to include Raging Battle Mouse to make your spells cheaper from the third turn onwards if we can sequence them appropriately.

Cori-Steel Cutter

Cori-Steel Cutter was a bit too strong for Standard. There is a problem with offering constant threats to a Turbo Xerox deck: they draw better than you, can find two spells more easily, and consequently trigger Cutter every turn, invalidating spot removals that don't permanently deal with the artifact.

As expected, Vivi Ornitier dodged the hammer, and we'll still see a lot of what the best Black Mage can do in Standard — whether with Prowess or Agatha's Soul Cauldron.

Without Cutter, Prowess remains a viable deck, but now faces the challenge of not having a creature in play every turn, regardless of how many are in the decklist. Vivi offers one threat, Stormchaser's Talent another, and Astrologian's Planisphere as well. We have Slickshot Show-Off and Drake Hatcher if needed, and Stock Up is still the archetype's main glue in longer games, so there's plenty of room for evolution and resilience.

What's changed is the potential for responses. Now, a Cori-Steel on turn two is no longer a concern, and the costs for cards like Planisphere or Vivi are easier to respond to with one-for-one trades — we no longer need to clutter our lists with Temporary Lockdowns and can go back to considering one-for-one trades with Prowess.

Up the Beanstalk

Up the Beanstalk was a design mistake, and its biggest victim — despite the ban being for Domain Overlords — are other archetypes that could generate value by circumventing its costs, like Golgari Mill.

There's no exact recovery formula for these decks. In the case of Domain Overlords, it is possible to go back to traditional shells with Atraxa, Grand Unifier as a card advantage bomb to replenish your hand, but for Golgari Mill, the closest thing to utility will probably be Garruk’s Uprising, but three mana is a considerably higher value to sequence the enchantment with one or two creatures. Until further notice, this deck is likely dead.

We can also mention Simic Terror and Otter lists, but they also lost another core card this Monday.

This Town Ain’t Big Enough

With cheap ETB effects, This Town Ain’t Big Enough has become too efficient and flexible to the point of reaching different strategies at all levels. For months, Bounce decks have been experiencing uncomfortable game patterns with the card, and its addition to Prowess with Vivi Ornitier and Stormchaser’s Talent sealed the card’s coffin.

Most decks that rely on This Town and Up the Beanstalk are pretty much dead now, and for Bounce lists, the question now remains whether the splash only for Kaito, Bane of Nightmares and Stormchaser’s Talent is enough, since Sunpearl Kirin already covers the role that once belonged to Fear of Isolation.

Otherwise, the most successful Bounce lists today are Orzhov due to Temporary Lockdown's interaction with the pre-ban Metagame and the fact that the enchantment, if returned to the hand, can reuse all ETBs on the battlefield. With rotation, or if Lockdown loses its slot, Bounce decks may need blue for Kaito, Bane of Nightmares to generate more value, especially if Midrange matches become so popular again that reusing Unholy Annex to create tokens is easily responded in different ways.

Hopeless Nightmare

But Bounce also lost another tool, and one full of controversy: Hopeless Nightmare. As simple as its effect is, many players have called for the card to be banned due to the sequencing it allowed with Nurturing Pixie, where the opponent started the game with two cards and four life less — this ban seems like a mistake to me personally.

The biggest problem with Bounce cards in Magic is that cost efficiency and design changes mean that ETB effects can be reused for very little cost. Nowadays, with all the super-efficient one- or two-mana things that do something when they come into play, it seems a bit pointless that Bounce effects themselves cost less than two mana.

This Town Ain’t Big Enough costs two mana to return two permanents to hand, while Nurturing Pixie costs one mana to bounce — that one-mana trade for a bounce is the crux of the problem, not a discard-and-damage spell that has Tinybones Joins Up as its replacement.

The sequencing lines with Hopeless Nightmare would be much more acceptable if the ban were on Nurturing Pixie instead of the enchantment. There is a reason why Experimental Synthesizer is so good in Pauper's Boros decks while Hopeless Nightmare can't do the same in Orzhov lists: Glint Hawk lets you reuse artifacts for one mana, and Nurturing Pixie offers the same effectiveness, but for any permanent.

Wizards may be afraid of permanently killing Bounce decks by removing Nurturing Pixie, but what they may have done is postpone a problem for a card that will only get better with every cheap ETB that comes out over the rest of the year and into the next nine months.

Now that the format has slowed down, the most efficient "turn four combo" in the format will probably be Unstoppable Slasher with Bloodletter of Aclazotz. Combined with Duress, Deep-Cavern Bat and the entire suite of removals and demons to enable an interactive, fair plan that can end games early when needed.

Whether Mono Black or two-color, this will likely be one of the safest picks in the coming weeks.

But the true safe pick of the format until rotation should be Dimir Midrange. Without Cori-Steel, it once again benefits from the mix of efficient threats and cheap removals to create an interactive game plan while burying the opponent with card advantage. The slower Metagame combined with the massive hit Domain Overlords took with the ban of Up the Beanstalk should put it in the spotlight.

Graveyard-based strategies may see a bit more prominence, but with none of them taking a direct hit from the bans, it's also natural that other archetypes will gear up with more graveyard hate now that they can open up slots that were previously allocated against Mono Red, Prowess, and Bounce.

Strategies that run the graveyard, but don't rely exclusively on it, may be some of the ones that stand out the most in the weeks leading up to the rotation. Among them, Boros Monument deserves to be revisited, and perhaps more pleasant surprises with discard and Monument to Endurance await us.

Players who bought or crafted Vivi Ornitier on Magic Arena will likely try Prowess for a while, but they may migrate to the Izzet Cauldron deck that excelled at Pro Tour Final Fantasy using the interaction between Agatha’s Soul Cauldron with the mage and creatures that gain +1/+1 counters, such as Marauding Mako and Voldaren Thrillseeker.

Although it’s not entirely clear how, Red Aggro will find a way to reestablish itself in the format. If I were to bet, I’d consider something similar to the Boros Aggro/Mice versions, or some version of Mono Red/Gruul Prowess. Tifa Lockhart decks are an option if players don't respect Aggro enough to have enough cheap removal.

That's all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Thanks for reading!