The beginning of the year began quite busy for us: we accepted three new committee members, reorganized our ranks, and changed the time for updating the banlist. From this update, each subsequent one will come out every 3 months. It will be approximately 6 weeks after the release of the new set.
During this time, we began to watch closely the tournament reports and the level of new and old cards. This led to the following changes:
Single card changes:
Thassa’s Oracle is banned.
Necrotic Ooze is banned.
Changes in Commander:
Urza, Lord High Artificer is banned as commander.
Date of entry of changes: 20/03/2020
Date of next announcement: 15/06/2020 Current banlist
Further individual explanations:
Thassa’s Oracle
Theros Beyond Death introduced this interesting Merfolek, who with his ability at first glance resembles Laboratory Maniac and Jace, Wielder of Mysteries. However, it soon became clear that Thassa's Oracle represents a whole new level. This is due to its very low cost of cmc 2 and the Etb ability so that it does not have to stay on the field to work unlike the previous two. This resulted in a new two card combo that can't be stopped with any removal spell. For this reason, we decided to ban Thassa's Oracle. Necrotic Ooze
Like Thassa's Oracle, our friend Ooze represents a non-interactive combo, which as soon as he enters the field he wins the game immediately without giving the opponent the opportunity to respond. For this reason, the best response to Necrotic Ooze, apart from gravehate cards, are Counterspells. Allowing such combos to continue to be present in our Meta will lead to an increase in the number of control decks, which will contribute to Combo vs Control Meta. As we can't let that happen, we say goodbye to Necrotic Ooze.
Changes in Commander:
Urza, Lord High Artificer
The card, which came out in June 2019 in the Modern Horizons expansion, quickly attracted the attention of all blue mages. After finding the optimal deck construction, Urza again and again began to show what he could do. His ability to produce a very fast and large amount of mana allowed him to play a large number of spells or activate many abilities in one turn. The main advantage of this ability was a very strong synergy with the cards: Winter Orb, Static Orb or, to a lesser extent, Howling Mine. These cards generally worked and made it difficult for both players to play but in the case of Urza they were one-sided. In addition, he had two other abilities. The third of them allowed him to play random spells from the top of the deck from mana generated from artifacts, generating an even greater advantage of cards. The last of his abilities creates an artifactic token, which he uses for mana, attack and / or block. All of his abilities generate a big advantage over his opponent, which was very difficult to stop. For this reason, we decided that it's time to say goodbye to Urza as a Commander.
As always we are looking forward to your feedback Your comitee: Wojciech Kopański, Radek Zelina, Justo Chacon, Alberto Milano, Piotr Dyczkowski, Diego Rivera, Ondřej Mašík.