Metagame: What Might be Banned on December 16

With nearly 40% of the metagame today, it’s clear that the Energy package requires intervention, and with almost six months since the release of Modern Horizons 3, the timing seems ideal for Wizards to step in.

In my last analysis, I mentioned that I didn’t like the idea of ​​banning Guide of Souls because it’s the heart of the current Energy package and the archetype’s main enabler. Today, given the archetype’s numbers and evolution in both Modern and Timeless (where it’s also one of the current top decks), it’s clear that Guide of Souls needs to leave the format.

The entire Energy package is better because Guide of Souls exists to keep the resources running: Amped Raptor can cast more expensive cards, Static Prison becomes as good as Leyline Binding without as many deckbuilding concessions, and Galvanic Discharge becomes the best damage removal in the Metagame to the point of making Unholy Heat obsolete, but it also interacts with the rest of the list.

But if we look at the other package of the archetype, the problem is bigger: the interaction of Ocelot Pride with Guide of Souls and Ajani, Nacatl Pariah creates some of the most powerful synergies that Modern has, and if we add it to the combat trigger of Guide of Souls, any of the tokens produced by these permanents becomes a threat on its own, in addition to their interaction with Goblin Bombardment.

Ajani, Nacatl Pariah, in fact, is another card that could be banned due to a design mistake: two copies of it shouldn't trigger each other and instantly turn it into a Planeswalker, and much of Boros Energy's attrition plan also involves this interaction and its potential with the rest of the list, but I doubt that removing it from the format would solve the problem with the archetype.

Another important piece in this equation is Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury, which, along with Guide of Souls, wins the game in two combat phases while being a three-mana Lightning Helix before being brought back.

All of these pieces together make Boros Energy the most oppressive fair deck in recent Modern history, and with an efficient one-drop enabling them all, there is no better option to ban for the sake of format diversity than removing Guide of Souls from the format on December 16.

Right now, The One Ring feels like a core piece to give Big Mana and Control a chance to compete in a more aggressive scenario, but without Boros Energy on December 16, it may be time to reevaluate this artifact’s position in the Metagame.

It's still the most played card in Modern at 60%, and several archetypes need it to function properly, but like Ajani, Nacatl Pariah, it has a design mistake that benefits running multiple copies, and its combination of Ancestral Recall with Time Walk allows Combo and/or Big Mana strategies to extend the game for another turn or two until they close out their game plan.

Ideally, Wizards will understand that the value engine provided by The One Ring takes away the potential of a dozen cards in the format, replaces all Planeswalkers in Control decks, and homogenizes the meaning of card advantage for Modern, and any non-interactive archetype becomes less susceptible to losing to Aggro when it can hold the game for two or more turn cycles while drawing three more cards per cycle, and will make the artifact banned along with Guide of Souls.

My expectation, however, is that regardless of which bans Boros Energy suffers, The One Ring will remain legal in Modern for another three to six months to assess the impact of the artifact in a potentially more diverse environment - which, at some point, will culminate in its ban anyway.

Legacy is going through a weird time. Between the ban of Grief and the arrival of Modern Horizons 3, in addition to Metamorphosis Fanatic that kept Reanimator at the top of the Metagame along with the Dimir Tempo variants, the format has focused too much on two recent cards at the top of its competitive chain: Psychic Frog and Vexing Bauble.

Psychic Frog presents the recurring problematic pattern in Tempo decks in Legacy: giving extra breathing room to strategies like Delver means removing its inherent weaknesses to the point of it being too present in the Metagame. Cards like Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer and Dreadhorde Arcanist were banned for very similar reasons, but Frog has a different problem - it's the perfect enabler for Reanimator and any other archetype that wants to take advantage of the graveyard while playing "fair" with a cheap source of card advantage.

The Legacy Metagame currently seems too focused on dealing with Psychic Frog, and its presence in the format today is equivalent to being the most played creature in the maindeck, with approximately 30% share. Perhaps the results of Eternal Weekend will make Wizards decide to keep the card around for a while longer, but this may be a long time, since maintenance in the format tends to be less frequent than desired.

Eternal Weekend, however, put another key card at the center of the ban discussion.

Vexing Bauble was the other most impactful card for Legacy in Modern Horizons 3, as it takes out of the format's main safety valves against the most unfair strategies in the Metagame: Force of Will and its younger siblings like Force of Negation, Daze, or even target answers played for free like Force of Vigor.

The intention of releasing this card was certainly to give Modern answers to the dozen free spells that took over the Metagame in Modern Horizons II and to hold back the Crashing Footfalls decks which took over the format months before MH3, but in Legacy, what Bauble has done is granting combos a free pass to execute their game plan without worrying about cheap disruption. The Force of Will that was supposed to stop a key card now must stop Vexing Bauble.

The result is that Wizards has a power of choice over the Legacy Metagame that it doesn't usually have: if Bauble stays, the message is that Force of Will needs to be responded to in kind and the company has decided that this “free pass” for degenerate decks is an acceptable choice for Legacy, but if they decide to remove the artifact from the format, it means that they prefer to maintain the status quo and identity that Legacy has always had, where Force of Will solidify Blue-Based as the main regulator.

However, there cannot be a middle ground: if Vexing Bauble is banned, Psychic Frog must also leave the format. The same logic does not apply if the opposite happens, but it certainly raises a greater alert on the potential risks that Bauble represents, since blue decks come out weakened by the bans.

Despite the constant complaints whenever we discuss the Pauper Metagame, I believe it is in a good place right now. The difference between it and the Pauper we know is how the pillars that solidify deckbuilding and which strategies work or not have changed over the years, and if before we had a triad of Faeries-Tron-Monarch, today the triad involves Affinity-Kuldotha-Broodscale.

This does not mean that the format does not have problems - it does, but none of them will be addressed with bans because these do not present plausible solutions to the equation: what Pauper needs, and this only depends on the game design, is better cards in more assertive strategies.

As mentioned by PFP member Alexandre Weber in our interview with him, Pauper currently suffers from the fact that every good new card is already released for an inherently strong archetype: Refurbished Familiar for Affinity, Clockwork Percussionist for Kuldotha Red, Cryptic Serpent for Mono Blue Terror, and so the status quo remains because the other viable archetypes in the Metagame take a long time to receive cards of their own: Gruul Ramp received Malevolent Rumble and Writhing Chrysalis and became one of the best decks in the format, white received Thraben Charm and is in the Tier 1.5 space, but other strategies have not received anything throughout the entire year and, therefore, cannot remain relevant.

My personal guess and feeling is that Pauper is in a scenario where, despite there being better decks, they are no different from the situations we've had in the format for the last decade where three to five archetypes are at the top and the rest are trying to prey on one or more of them - that's how Metagames work.

There are two cards I'd like to discuss, though:

The first is Krark-Clan Shaman. There are many decks in Pauper that seem invalidated today by the fact that Affinity and the most famous Broodscale Combo variant have access to a one-mana sweeper that generates card advantage with artifacts like Ichor Wellspring, not to mention the various micro-interactions with the stack that we can apply with it.

On one hand, I think Pauper would be better off without Krark-Clan Shaman today because there are already many efficient sweepers for colors that usually have this type of effect, from Fiery Cannonade to Drown in Sorrow. They all have a real cost to being used and do not produce synergistic value on top of cards that, by nature, already interact well with other powerful engines.

On the other hand, what types of degenerate strategies is Krark-Clan Shaman holding? The first one that comes to mind is the Broodscale Combo, which can respond perfectly to spot removals and sweepers, but requires too much interaction to deal with multiple Shaman activations, and perhaps removing it from the Metagame would mean giving more space to a combo that, by itself, already presents some risky patterns if not thoroughly checked.

Another deck held by Shaman is Kuldotha Red, where a few more games would be won freely due to the lack of early game interactions.

The second card is Deadly Dispute, the most played maindeck spell in Pauper and the second most played card of the entire format. Dispute escapes the bans because there are a dozen variants of its effects in the format, from Reckoner’s Bargain to Eviscerator’s Insight, but there is a difference between these and even Fanatical Offering compared to Deadly Dispute: the Treasure token.

From manafixing to feeding other cards that care about artifacts, Dispute offers a bit more value than any other effect that does the same thing as it, and the number of archetypes that take advantage of this Treasure token and that, perhaps, would not have the same benefit from a Fanatical Offering is not small, but perhaps also not large enough to justify its ban.

Its place in the current Metagame today is comparable to other cards that were once pillars. For me, it has taken a position that previously belonged to Preordain or Ninja of the Deep Hours in other times, which doesn't deem it in a broken and ban-worthy card, but rather something that we can evaluate if it would be better for Pauper if it didn't exist.

That's all for today!

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

Thanks for reading!