Pioneer: Can the format be fixed?

Every now and then, we can say something about Magic's main competitive formats. Standard, for example, is considered healthy today, while Modern is facing another dilemma caused by the wave of power creep with Modern Horizons 3, which brought Nadu, Winged Wisdom to the spotlight along with a dozen other cards that make up the main decks. Pauper, on the other hand, has been undergoing changes at the top of its competitive chain, the outcome of which around the Basking Broodscale combo are still uncertain.

Pioneer, however, can carry a title similar to a burden: “an unfortunate format”. Since its conception, no other competitive and non-rotating Magic modality has gone through so many controversies in such a short time.

With frequent bans to adjust the Metagame during its first months, Pioneer underwent a major shift with Theros Beyond Death, where Thassa’s Oracle, Underworld Breach and Heliod, Sun-Crowned dominated the environment with their respective combos - and with the Covid-19 pandemic ending the 2020 tabletop play and event season, the format spent too much time with these three archetypes at the top.

Today, in 2024, Pioneer is once again experiencing a situation with three decks, at least two of which have troublesome patterns: Rakdos Vampires has over 30% share at the top of the Metagame and its combo of Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord and Vein Ripper is showing up in other strategies, Amalia Benavides Aguirre continues to limit the space that Aggro has in the format and creates anti-game situations in her combo with Wildgrowth Walker and, for some, Izzet Phoenix demonstrates an equally troublesome pattern by being the only strategy that can consistently keep up with the two broken decks.

Given the circumstances, it is common for players to feel unmotivated to play the format, which leads us to ask: after all, can Pioneer be fixed? Will bans on August 26th be enough?

In the current state of Pioneer, the Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord and Vein Ripper combo has become the elephant in the room.

When it was revealed, I don't think many players really thought that a Vampire whose only function was to have a decent body and built-in protection would cause so much damage to the format, but dealing with a 6/5 Flying on turn five (after a Fable of the Mirror-Breaker) is quite different from dealing with it on turn three with the risk of it still gaining 7 life on its first attack.

Seth Manfield's victory with Rakdos Vampires on the Pro Tour Murders at Karlov Manor opened the door for it to become the best deck in the format and has remained in that position ever since, averaging over 30% in the Top 32 of Challenges, placing it in the position of potentially broken.

And if there were any doubts about the combo's potential, players started to include Sorin and Vein Ripper even in archetypes without a Vampire shell in their lists.

Rakdos Sacrifice can extract value from Vein Ripper by turning any Witch's Oven or Deadly Dispute trigger into a Shock against the opponent, not unlike Mayhem Devil.

And Rakdos Midrange can forgo the vampire core in favor of its more traditional cards while still getting the most out of Vein Ripper, either with Sorin or as a powerful late-game threat. Grixis variants also occasionally appear in Leagues, but the shell seems consistent enough that it doesn't need the third color, and it also makes it easier to include Mutavault for more interactions with Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord.

At this point, it's very likely that Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord will be banned next Monday. Besides being the enabler that allows us to cheat on Vein Ripper, banning the creature only serves as a stopgap measure: more Vampires will be released in the future, and eventually another powerful high-cost drop will take its place, not to mention the board and game progression interactions that the Planeswalker has created with his Lightning Helix.

The past few weeks have proven that Sorin doesn't exclusively require Vampires to be good, and Vein Ripper remains a powerful late-game drop that we can ramp to turn five with Fable of the Mirror-Breaker and Deadly Dispute, so dealing with the piece that enables the combo seems like the ideal solution.

One of the most frequent comments about Magic in the last two years is that the game has gained too many words. Flavor texts no longer exist, and each rare or mythic card from a new set has less free space in the text box than it did in the previous set - consequently, mechanics become more complex and interactions with them more difficult to predict.

Amalia Benavides Aguirre was not one of those cases. On the first day the card was revealed, everyone was already talking about its combo with Wildgrowth Walker where any instance of Explore or life gain will generate a loop where Amalia will have the free path to deal lethal damage, but her deck has two problems in the Metagame.

The first is the fact that Amalia has a design mistake. Her ability is an instance of “must” rather than “may” (i.e., the player is required to follow the trigger if it happens), and if for some reason Wildgrowth Walker is not destroyed by her trigger when she reaches 20 power, the loop will continue indefinitely unless one of the players has a way to interrupt it.

This interaction is intentionally exploited throughout matches even at professional levels: the Pro Tour Murders semifinals went to Game 7 because Simon Nielsen could always use Loran’s Escape to tie the game, but it is common for Amalia lists to have Selfless Savior to protect their creatures and, in extreme cases, force a draw because there is no clause in the Magic rules that says this is not a legal play - the result is many anti-play patterns across all platforms and tournament RELs.

In an ideal world, Amalia would say that the player can explore and errata would be possible in this case, just like they did with Hostage Taker at Ixalan - the original version of the card allowed to exile itself and was an infinite loop if there were no other creatures in play - but the deck that the combo is in is a powerful and very efficient toolbox, limiting the viability of almost all Aggro in Pioneer today.

You have to be very fast (Gruul Prowess) or very interactive (Azorius Spirits), or you don't stand a chance against Amalia, so decks like Humans, Boros Convoke and other more linear strategies are nullified by the absurd life gain provided by her shell. It's natural for these decks to lose to excessive lifegain, and Selesnya Angels was made for this purpose, but these strategies suffer against Control, Combo, and Midrange, where Amalia can perform decently against all three while feeding on Aggro.

Given the precedents of anti-play patterns in competitive Magic that led to bans and the note in the last announcement that they were keeping an eye on Amalia Benavides Aguirre, it's very likely that she or Wildgrowth Walker will be banned next Monday.

The third and most controversial case is Izzet Phoenix.

Arclight Phoenix is to Pioneer what Delver of Secrets is to Legacy: it is the format's "fun police" that keeps the most absurd things in check while also being the metric that players need to adapt to have a chance of competing in the format - Izzet Phoenix itself competes for this position with Rakdos Midrange.

The two also share a common trait in that every "best deck in the format" suffers from the possibility of getting something too strong that turns it from "police" to "oppressor" - Rakdos Vampires is nothing more than the broken version of Rakdos Midrange, Expressive Iteration was too strong for Izzet Phoenix because it was already the best option - and there are always doubts whether the position of these archetypes is really healthy in the Metagame.

The debate surrounding Phoenix almost always revolves around the card that has proven to be too broken for all other competitive formats: Treasure Cruise, the closest thing to Ancestral Recall that Magic has ever had, and which Izzet decks have enjoyed throughout its longevity in Modern and Legacy. It's not uncommon to see comments about how the Khans of Tarkir spell should be banned because it offers too many resources to Phoenix.

A possible ban on Treasure Cruise would consequently mean banning Dig Through Time for similar reasons: one more mana and one less card are compensated in some cases by the Instant-Speed ​​in longer games and by the selection of two cards among the seven at the top, making it easier to find answers or more resources to sequence spells - the deck may be a turn slower, but let's face it, it gains in consistency in attrition games and loses in what are naturally already bad matchups for it.

Another problem with this intervention is its probability. Wizards considers Treasure Cruise to be one of the great attractions of Pioneer, one of the reasons that lead players to get to know the format, and while this logic didn't stop Gush from being banned from Pauper when it became too oppressive, this doesn't seem to be the case with Izzet Phoenix today - it remains at the top because it is one of the archetypes with the best ability to adapt to the Metagame, including splashes for to add Pick Your Poison in the Sideboard.

In a world without Amalia and without Vampires, the Metagame may return to what it was, and Izzet Phoenix will need to compete with Rakdos Midrange and with more targeted hate, which may - or may not - indicate a change to a healthy format, and if it doesn't, Arclight Phoenix even seems likely to be banned before Treasure Cruise if Wizards continues with the logic of Delve spells being the biggest lure for playing Pioneer.

For the current problem, yes. Ban Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord and Amalia Benavides Aguirre while keeping an eye on Treasure Cruise or Arclight Phoenix, which shouldn't be affected in this next announcement because it's a format police and the bans occur relatively close to the Duskmourn previews.

But Pioneer has other problems that keep players away from it, the main one being that the Metagame isn't fun for a portion because it's a more static and less active format than the others, a natural consequence of not having the same inconsistency of rotating formats or the same release window with power creep as Modern Horizons does with the other eternal formats - it's less affected by releases and the public's consumption patterns have changed to the point where they deem the lack of changes as "bad", especially when the Metagame isn't fun to play.

The format has room for improvement and does not depend on complementary products increasing the pool of legal cards in Pioneer (although Death’s Shadow fits so well with Duskmourn, just saying), but on a more assertive care with the Metagame: Amalia and Sorin stayed too long, Inverter of Truth and its companions in Theros Beyond Death stayed too long. It is not possible to make the format attractive when its competitive environment is bad for months and drives people away from playing.

Maybe Wizards needs a more specialized committee for its competitive formats. It didn't seem fine that Nadu, Winged Wisdom stayed so long in Modern, just like Grief in Legacy or the aforementioned Sorin and Amalia in Pioneer - and the interventions in Pauper before the Pauper Format Panel were so scarce that players protested on Magic Online by registering lists with only basic lands in Leagues and other events.

In the same way that Pioneer being a more static format gives the feeling of being obsolete because players' consumption patterns have changed post-pandemic, the speed at which interventions need to happen have also changed and Wizards needs to be more assertive when making its announcements. There is no reason to "wait and see" if Amalia continues to be a problem when her problem lies in the way the card works, there is no reason to wait after the Pro Tour to see if Nadu, Winged Wisdom was broken when it was already causing unhealthy play patterns in the first weeks of Modern Horizons 3.

Keeping a standard date for bans is ideal - no one liked and does not like surprise interventions on any given Monday, but these announcements must be surgical and understand where the problems are and how to fix them, and a committee similar to PFP for other competitive formats - people with the freedom to speak openly with their communities but not willing to attend to the community's every outrage - would serve to make Magic a healthier game in its competitive REL.

That's all for today!

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

Thanks for reading!