Pioneer: A New Red Dilemma Arises

Pioneer has a new best deck: Izzet Prowess has taken advantage of the gap left by the banning of Heartfire Hero and the release of the Lessons package from Avatar to show the format why Cori-Steel Cutter was banned from Standard and remains one of the most powerful staples in Pioneer, Modern and Legacy.

The archetype has seen the biggest growth in the format in the last 30 days: at the time of writing, Prowess represents more than 33% of the format's Metagame and comprised more than 45% of the Top 32 in two Challenges from the first week of January and occupied five of the eight Top 8 spots in the Pioneer Super Qualifier — proof that, despite the deck having established itself in the format for over a month, the Metagame is having severe difficulties adapting.

With Lessons, Prowess has become more consistent in triggering Cori-Steel Cutter thanks to Boomerang Basics, which functions as a cantrip and interaction while reusing cards like Stormchaser's Talent, and with Strixhaven available in Pioneer, the archetype can utilize Academic Dispute—very decent on its own for an aggressive Prowess list—to have virtually seven copies of the card while enabling an effective toolbox with removal, protection, and stack interaction.

Let's not mince words.

There's a specific category of cards in Magic: The Gathering that only tends to improve with each new release, as they require very little to work and gain a lot of support because they only need a generic effect or fit a very common and/or popular pattern in the card game.

Cori-Steel Cutter only requires cheap spells: any cantrip, pseudo-Lightning Bolt, aggressive drop, or Bounce is enough to provide the artifact with what it needs to remain relevant in the competitive scene, and with Magic releasing seven sets in 2026, it's difficult to imagine that the individual quality of these new cards won't amplify the problems we're already seeing due to Boomerang Basics and Heroes' Hangout.

Prowess is still very strong in Standard — despite having a Midrange/Control stance today — and Cori-Steel Cutter, just like in Standard, severely undermines the possibility of responding with equal resources without specific cards to deal with the artifact and its tokens simultaneously.

The cheap answers we have today don't deal with the artifact like Pest Control, or are too easy to resolve with Boomerang Basics, meaning the archetype doesn't even need to consider saving slots for counterplays since the deck used to solve these problems already interacts directly with its proactive game plan.

Therefore, the only possible route to the format's health in the short term is banning Cori-Steel Cutter to bring more diversity to Pioneer and address the main issues the Metagame faces today and can't solve through traditional means.

Not much, as dedicating an entire deck to beating Prowess will leave you disadvantaged against the rest of the format.

Selesnya Company was another archetype that grew in the last month as Badgermole Cub leveraged the explosive potential of mana dorks and allowed Ouroboroid to be included in decks as a mid-game bomb, and cards like Pest Control or Temporary Lockdown do very little in that matchup, while spot removals are more effective at dealing with threats with high individual value.

Company, in particular, seems to be well-positioned to compete on equal footing with Prowess by imposing a wider board position, preferably without sacrificing so much interactivity — for practical purposes, this means that you must have a more impositive battlefield while also having pieces that deal with the deck's main threats, or just go for the Boros Convoke route and be faster.

On the other hand, some players have been extensively testing an Orzhov Control deck for a few weeks, and it soon transitioned to an Orzhov Demons deck, swapping the splash of for to gain access to Vanishing Verse and High Noon — two great cards against Prowess — as well as Doorkeeper Thrull and Blood Baron of Vizkopa against Selesnya Company, which shows the format's attempts to continue adapting to the current state of the format.

The same can be said for recent Bounce iterations, which now include Boomerang Basics to enhance consistency and can accommodate both Temporary Lockdown and Vanishing Verse without sacrificing interaction and value engines thanks to the deck's synergy with Yorion, Sky Nomad. This strategy also manages to proactively use Lockdown in games where the card isn't as important against the opponent, since it exiles all your cheap permanents as well and, upon being returned to the hand, reuses all of their ETBs.

Even without Heartfire Hero, Pioneer's issues still seem too tied to the current state of Standard. Mono Red Mice and Izzet Prowess proved to be troublesome and oppressive last season and repeated the same pattern in the non-rotating format, perhaps a common symptom of a Magic that is releasing more and more products and having more difficulty balancing its main competitive scene with a three-year rotation.

Standard is at much greater risk since the amplified card pool opens up potential for interaction that wasn't previously planned: as Mark Rosewater once pointed out on his blog, just one minute after the release of a new Magic set is enough for the entire community to spend more time with the new cards than the entire playtesting team, and there's a natural balance in every TCG where the design team tries to deliver something exciting enough and the community tries to break that something — the risks today are just higher and more frequent as the combination of more releases per year plus a longer rotation creates more possibilities and interactions.

If Bounce, Mono Red, and Prowess were a problem and we had the dominance of Izzet Cauldron soon after, we can't say that Standard has been living its most stable times, and its poor health directly harms Pioneer. After all, it was designed to be the format where Standard cards go when they rotate, and that also includes banned cards. It's natural that players would look to Pioneer to play with their Cori-Steels or This Towns when those are no longer legal in the main competitive scene.

This relationship between the two formats was established considering that players might miss that exciting deck or that card that just rotated and would like to use it in another setting—just as was the purpose of Modern in its original conception—but today, the main Pioneer staples leaving Standard are those that players hated playing against and ended up banned.

If players were tired of facing Sheoldred, the Apocalypse when it rotated out, what can we say about Cori-Steel Cutter, Heartfire Hero, or This Town Ain't Big Enough when those cards caused real damage to Standard's overall health? And if these are (or were) such strong staples in Pioneer that they pose real risks to the Metagame as they did previously in Standard, what motivator are we giving Standard players to feel compelled to play Pioneer other than "too bad your deck was banned, try it out on Pioneer" ?

Heartfire Hero was only banned because the dynamics of non-interactive games in Magic Arena for Pioneer were too high, and Cutter will likely suffer the same fate for similar reasons. The problem, however, will remain in both formats as long as the quality of answers that Magic offers with each set does not match the individual and/or synergistic quality of the threats.

Magic still hesitates to reprint cards like Path to Exile because they are too strong for Standard while releasing Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath, Cori-Steel Cutter and Vivi Ornitier as threats we need to deal with with what we have, and this disparity continues to cause problems, one set after another — and will continue to do so until competitive balance is properly addressed for such an aggressive release window and such a long rotation that also affects the collective perception of what Pioneer represents.

That's all for today!

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Thank you for reading!