Welcome to the June update of our ban list. In the last three months we had the opportunity to play with cards from Kaldheim and Strixhaven. Following the recent ban of Uro as Commander, Leviathan's meta looks quite diverse and healthy. We continue to monitor and test the cards that received the highest number of votes in the poll you completed for us. Modern Horizons 2 is coming soon and it can maybe "shake" our format. Meanwhile, we invite you to look at the banlist update. ;)
Unbanned as Commander:
Vial Smasher
Announcement Date: June 14, 2021
Date of entry of changes: June 18, 2021
Date of next announcement: September 13, 2021
Further Explanation
Vial Smasher
It belongs to the first generation of partners that appeared in our format in 2016. From the outset, he was hailed as one of the best and strongest Commanders of the time. He was also mostly paired with a blue partner for access to counterspells. This made him a very strong, oppressive and most used Commander. For these reasons, it was banned in 2017. However, 4 years have passed since then and a lot has changed. One of the key things is the starting hand rule introduced by the committee when playing cards with the partner ability. Another is the amount of sets, new cards, commanders and decks that have appeared in leviathan. On this basis, as a committee, we decided to check if Vial was still what it used to be. It quickly turned out that the starting hand rule weakened our goblin (the same as in the case of Tymn, Esior, Thrasios, etc.) by taking from him an additional resource in the form of one card more than in the case of playing with non-partners. Other obstacles he faced were the whole range of new Commanders (such as: Winota, Leovold, Golos, Hogaak etc), as well as a large pool of 1 and 2 man removal spells that can be found in the format. After playing a lot of games with different combinations (Vial + Esior, Vial + Sakashima, Vial + Kraum, Vial + Tymna etc) together as a whole committee we got only 53% win rate which allows us to unban the Vial Smasher let him roam in Leviathan.
As always, we are looking forward to your feedback.
Your comitee:
Wojciech Kopański, Justo Chacon, Diego Rivera, Meng Du, Leonardo Leal, Marcos Mayora, Pawel Dziewulski.
And Your RP: Diego Paredes, Mengshi Guo, Nacho Monza.