Earlier this week, Wizards of the Coast's Magic: The Gatheringbanned and restricted announcement didn't make any changes in Standard and Modern formats, and many players voiced their concerns that Standard will continue to be a "broken format" because Felidar Guardian didn't get the ban hammer, but now, Wizards just published an addendum to the banned and restricted announcement, only to break Standard's most powerful combo.
Effective on April 28: Felidar Guardian from Aether Revolt is banned. Of course, this would kill the efficient Saheeli + Felidar Guardian combo deck that has been dominating Standard since Aether Revolt was launched back in February. So why did they just announce just now instead of adding the change in the official announcement earlier this week?
"The answer is data. We knew going into Monday that the Saheeli-Felidar combo was a significant issue for Standard and were watching it closely" Aaron Forsythe of Wizards of the Coast explained, "Since the initial announcement, for the first time ever, we pre-released a new card set on Magic Online before the formal release date. This happened on Monday. What we expected to take a few weeks to understand has ended up taking two days to form a clear picture of a metagame unbalanced by the Copy Cat combo, as even its natural predator, Mardu Vehicles, fell behind. Couple this with consensus among a wide sampling of pros and feedback (and pizza) from our community and we decided to take action."
Since Monday, Saheeli combo (or "Copycat" deck) has made up approximately 40% of 5-0 and 4-1 decklists in Magic Online Standard leagues. After observing the data and noticing the change in the norm, Wizards decided to take action and ban Felidar Guardian.
"For that we take ownership and are making changes to try to prevent this from happening again," Forsythe added. "But our highest priority is keeping Magic fun and enjoyable for our players. We believe this banning coupled with a number of internal testing process improvements will be significant steps toward making Standard the fun, dynamic format we all want it to be in perpetuity."
Now, that Felidar is banned from that Standard, I'm sure many players are happy that they won't have to prepare to disrupt the deadly combo.
So what do you think about Wizards' decision to ban Felidar Guardian in Standard?
Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Amonkhet, the first set of the Amonkhet block, will be released on April 28. Prerelease events will take place on April 22-23, 2017.
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