Why is wild nacatl banned

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Pre-registration available now! Cloudpost decks were capable of generating as much as fifteen mana on turn four or so, and Green Sun's Zenith was removed mostly for diversity's sake among green decks.

After facing the stress test of the Pro Tour, this is what many would consider the start of the Modern format as we know it today, with combo decks slowed considerably and some of the more absurd outliers of the format brought to bear.

That led to the rise of aggressive decks and midrange decks. Banned: Punishing Fire and Wild Nacatl. While there were aggressive decks, control decks, attrition decks, and combination decks that succeeded, the diversity was not ideal.

In particular, the heavy majority of all aggressive decks were Zoo decks. We looked at why other aggressive decks were not played, and after our analysis decided to ban two cards. With the crazy combo decks and massive mana decks hindered, the next move was to help diversify the aggressive decks of the format. Punishing Fire was particularly, um, punishing, to anything with less than 3 toughness, as was Wild Nacatl.

Unbanned: Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle. Since Modern is a non-rotating format, banned cards never rotate out. The DCI is unbanning a card to see how that affects the format. We looked for cards that were on the initial banned list for Pro Tour Philadelphia. We wanted a card that would not easily slot into an existing top deck and also wanted to enable a deck with a different play pattern than the current top decks.

After examining the options, Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle was selected as the card to unban. The effect was exactly as desired, as Scapeshift has become a key part of the Modern metagame, but is far from dominant or oppressive.

Rich Stein. Hipsters is proudly sponsored by:. Eternal formats are difficult to impact by only printing new cards. From time to time a card like Deathrite Shaman or Snapcaster Mage come along and have a large impact. Usually only one or two cards each year has such an impact, if any at all.

More often than not, Wizards manages these formats through the use of the banning and un-banning of cards. In the beginning , in August of , there were 21 cards on the Modern banned list. The cards on the list fell into three categories. Finally, the last group was cards that were reminiscent of decks that had dominated Standard in the recent past. Six more cards were banned from the format in an effort to further stifle the insanely fast combo kills.

Instead, they completely vanished from the format. Still, the format lent itself to combo kills and in May, Second Sunrise was also axed.

But, for the first time since Valakut, ghosts of the past are returning…. This is great news for almost everyone more on that later. To start, shaking up the format right before a Pro Tour is a hallmark of Wizards management of the banned list. The return of these cards can help diversify the format. For fans of the game, diversity in a format is critically important. Many of the complaints about Theros Standard are the constant mirror matches and face-to-face match-ups of the same three decks.

In recent memory, the two most damaging events to the Magic player-base were the existence of Affinity in Standard and the existence of Jace, the Mind Sculptor in Standard.

Why was this the case? It was because every match-up involved one or both of these dominant decks.