Metagame: What Might be Banned on November 10

Next Monday, November 10th, Magic: The Gathering will release the last banned and restricted update of 2025. The announcement aims to address the issues in Standard caused by the Vivi Ornitier and Agatha’s Soul Cauldron combo and define the future of the card High Tide in Pauper, but it is also an opportunity to perform maintenance on other competitive environments.

One of the biggest demands from the community has been in Legacy, where Reanimate decks have dominated the Metagame since players revamped the archetype to Dimir colors and transformed it into a Tempo deck with a combo finisher. Pioneer also has its own demands for bannings, but with the little relevance that Wizards of the Coast has given to the format, it seems unlikely that an intervention will occur.

Modern is safe this time. The Pro Tour Edge of Eternities showed a diverse metagame and there have been considerable changes in decks throughout the year with additions from the 2025 sets, and without a new wave of power creep on the way, it is likely that the format will remain stable during the next year.

The likely most considerable change in the update will be in the Standard format, where Izzet Cauldron, an aggressive combo deck running the interaction of Agatha’s Soul Cauldron with Vivi Ornitier, has dominated the Metagame since the rotation — Wizards of the Coast openly admitted that the deck was a problem and chose not to make an emergency intervention to maintain the consistency of the RCQ and Spotlight Series schedules.

It is more than evident that Agatha’s Soul Cauldron and/or Vivi Ornitier will be the main targets of the November 10th bannings. While players debate which of the two should be banned — Soul Cauldron is only broken in the current season because Vivi exists, while Vivi has notorious design issues, but which only manifest as a threat to the Metagame because Soul Cauldron bypasses the mana ability restriction — the most prudent choice might be to ban both.

Nothing good will come of Agatha’s Soul Cauldron. The ability to copy activated abilities and the extensive interaction with +1/+1 counters in the current Standard is the perfect recipe for breaking the artifact with any other stronger effect that may come out during the next year.

We may feel "safe" with the idea that there are enough answers to artifacts and graveyards in the format, but that didn't stop Izzet Cauldron from polarizing the Metagame, and therefore, we cannot "trust" again in this availability of answers to deal with another potentially troublesome interaction.

It will be intriguing to find out if Wizards of the Coast will choose to ban one of the most coveted cards from the best-selling Magic set of all time. Vivi Ornitier's mana generation ability gets out of control easily and puts players far ahead of their opponents with the right card base: before Soul Cauldron, there was Stormchaser’s Talent as a mana sink, and the fact that Vivi also provides reach with each spell cast is an unwanted bonus for the current Standard circumstances.

It can be argued that, without Cori-Steel Cutter, Prowess decks became easy to answer, and therefore Vivi can remain in Standard, but its problem is very similar to Agatha’s Soul Cauldron: once another combination of cards favors it, nothing good will come of the best Black Mage of all time in Standard.

This is too high a risk for a card that, unlike Cauldron, will still be in the format for three years. The banning of at least one of the above seems obvious. The question remains whether Wizards' intention with the update will be simply to correct an error and try to keep the rest of the Metagame intact, or if the company will take the opportunity to perform another major overhaul to address other gaps that the pre-rotation banlist may have left.

In the second case, Mono Red Aggro is also the subject of debate. In theory, its position in the format today is mainly because it's the best predator of Izzet Cauldron when it makes dozens of deckbuilding concessions to punish the opponent with cards like Razorkin Needlehead and even Scalding Viper, in addition to benefiting from the fact that dedicated hate in sideboards is more focused on dealing with the best deck than on responding to the "deck that beats the best deck".

If a more extensive overhaul occurs, the challenge is to get it right in what to remove from Mono Red when it has already lost Heartfire Hero and Monstrous Rage last season.

Screaming Nemesis is the only card with any minimal possibility of being banned in the current shell, as it presents a troublesome patternby hindering one of the main ways to interact with aggressive red decks for the rest of the game: gaining life.

Furthermore, Nemesis also carries, in part, the same problem that existed in Monstrous Rage: by dealing damage to the opponent when it receives damage, it basically punishes blocking since trying to prevent the three damage it deals will forever hinder your ability to hold off the Mono Red's clock, even when blocking with a 1/1 token.

An intervention in Mono Red, however, seems unlikely. Without Cauldron in the way, players will have more room to deal with other strategies and adopt more answers to deal with Aggro decks, including more interactions for Screaming Nemesis.

Another community concern is Dimir Midrange dominating Standard in the absence of Izzet Cauldron, given that this is the only archetype outside the Izzet-Mono Red axis with major results.

In essence, Dimir Midrange is a deck composed of several cheap creatures and removals mixed with Enduring Curiosity and Kaito, Bane of Nightmares for card advantage, and the discussion tends to revolve around banning one of the two: Kaito dodges Counterspells and removals on the turn it enters while benefiting from reusing ETBs, and Enduring Curiosity is hard-to-kill and easily turns any creature with Flying into a threat.

The probability of a ban in this archetype, however, is extremely low: Dimir Midrange is categorized as a fair deck, and Wizards of the Coast tends to accept or even consider it ideal that the best Standard strategy is a Midrange or Tempo deck, given that these usually act as format regulators — furthermore, as in the case of Mono Red, the absence of Izzet Cauldron also offers players the opportunity to adapt against other strategies, and there are a good number of efficient answers against Dimir today.

Omniscience has been featured in a combo with Kona, Rescue Beastie and the Edge of Eternities planets to put the enchantment into play for free, culminating in a sequence similar to what happened with Abuelo’s Awakening last season and again leading to the discussion of banning Omniscience or its enabler.

Unlike other archetypes, combos of this category tend to present dangerous patterns and polarize Metagames, which would justify banning the enchantment outright after it has been a threat to the format for the second time — but it seems unlikely that this intervention will happen at a time when it seems a safe bet that, coupled with the inclusion of assertive answers, removing the dominant strategy from the Metagame would also affect the position of other combos.

Given WotC's lack of attention to Pioneer and the absence of the format in the 2026 competitive landscape, it seems unlikely that the next Banned and Restricted update will make substantial changes to the format.

In a recent article, I mentioned that one of the ways to save Pioneer from oblivion is to be more aggressive with bans so that the format has a new sense of identity that seems attractive to players, since the current Metagame gives the impression of being too stale, which would involve removing a dozen staples and potentially troublesome cards to reset the competitive landscape.

Modern doesn't need bans.

The results of Pro Tour Edge of Eternities and subsequent events show a diverse format with the rise of new strategies, such as the Blink variants with Quantum Riddler, Affinity with Pinnacle Emissary, and Prowess lists with Cori-Steel Cutter.

Without Modern Horizons 4 for 2026, it's likely that the format's Metagame will remain healthy for a good while, at least until the community solves the format again and finds its next major best deck.

The next banlist also marks the date of the verdict on whether High Tide will remain or be removed from the format after the trial unban proposed by the Pauper Format Panel.

There are reasons to keep the card in the format, but there are also risks and circumstances caused by its combo that are detrimental to tabletop events, as High Tide is a non-deterministic combo that can take up ten or more minutes of the entire event if its controller starts the sequence of spells during the final five turns of the round.

Last week, we published an article dedicated to discussing this ban. The verdict, despite presenting the pros and cons of keeping or removing High Tide from Pauper, is that the card represents a risk to the medium-term health of the format and interferes with the presence of some archetypes in the competitive ecosystem, preventing them from existing.

There is also a symbiotic relationship between this archetype and Blue Tempo decks, since High Tide keeps in check archetypes whose history is to serve as predators of Faeries and Blue Delver but lack the speed and tools to deal with a non-interactive combo, while these same blue decks are the ones that keep High Tide in check today and prevent its dominance in the competitive Metagame.

With the results of the Eternal Weekend, the discussion about bans in Legacy has returned to addressing a card that has existed in the format for decades but whose improvements in the quality of threats have made it a problem: Entomb.

Reanimator decks have been the best strategy in Legacy for two years, when they changed from a "combo" shell to being a "Tempo with a Combo finisher," and have already led to the banning of Grief, Troll of Khazad-dûm, and Psychic Frog, but WotC refuses to touch the heart of the archetype and intervene in cards like Reanimate and Entomb, which are the basis of its consistency, hoping that the deck will still have the means to one day return to a "full combo" state.

At this point, it is already evident that Reanimator will never return to what it was. Once it was discovered that a fair archetype could accommodate an unfair shell and maintain consistency in interacting and winning matches, there are few reasons outside of speed to return to the original game plan (Rakdos) which, today, has become more vulnerable and whose main need to exist—speed—is also suppressed by the quality of cards in the versions.

Therefore, it is expected that, this time, Entomb will finally get the hammer after two years for making it too easy to execute the Reanimate plan by searching for any card in the deck to put into the graveyard. This could be replaced by looting effects like Careful Study, which is far from the quality standard that a tutor guarantees—Reanimator, in theory, would remain a viable deck, but now there are greater concessions in playing it like a Tempo deck.

Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student is also a common target for ban requests.

Like other one-drops before her, Tamiyo interacts a little too well with the Legacy environment, where her ability triggers with a Brainstorm, and the value accumulated by her, if not answered in time, is too high and will carry the game.

Banning Tamiyo would aim at almost the same objective as most interventions in Legacy: weakening blue decks, whose structure with Force of Will and cantrips acts as a regulator, and, being in that position, any power level boost puts them in the role of oppressor.

Nadu, Winged Wisdom has been dodging the Legacy banlist for over a year, and its deck has evolved into several variants since then—from Gaea's Cradle Control that uses the bird with Nomads en-Kor in a few copies to close the combo when needed to all-in versions that try to finish the game early.

While Nadu isn't a risk on digital platforms, it presents the same logistical problems in Legacy that it did in Modern and even Commander and is similar to High Tide in Pauper in this category, where the "combo turn" can take a long time to execute, which hinders the development of the match between players and also the flow of tournaments.

Today, the Eternal Weekend is the only tabletop event that has any relevance for WotC when it comes to intervening in Legacy, and therefore the only place where Nadu, Winged Wisdom has the opportunity to show its potential in the format, and while there are several tools to contain it, the logistical problems persist and may, at some point, serve as justification for a ban.

That's all for today!

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Thank you for reading!