Magic: The Gathering Cards Banned & Suspended in Standard, Pioneer, Historic & Brawl

In a surprising decision, Wizards of the Coast has made a Magic: The Gatheringban and restricted announcement today, affecting cards of the game's various Constructed formats.

Credit: Wizards of the Coast

Effective on August 3, here are the cards banned and suspended today:

Standard

Wilderness Reclamation (banned)

Growth Spiral (banned)

Teferi,Time Raveler (banned)

Cauldron Familiar (banned)

Pioneer

Inverter of Truth (banned)

Kethis the Hidden Hand (banned)

Walking Ballista (banned)

Underworld Breach (banned)

Historic

Wilderness Reclamation (suspended)

Teferi, Time Raveler (suspended)

Brawl

Teferi, Time Raveler (banned)

"This set of changes is a deviation from our usual banned-list philosophy for Standard, and as such, we consider it an experiment," Wizards of the Coast's Ian Duke said. "Outside of the very top levels of competitive play, including throughout most of the MTG Arena traditional Standard ladder, we're seeing a good distribution of deck diversity and win rates. However, at the skill level of our most competitive tournaments and the Mythic ranking on the Arena adder, we do see a small number of decks with high win rates and play rates that have remained in that metagame position for quite some time."

Since Wizards previously didn't give an advanced notice about these changes like they usually do, this announcement is pretty surprising.

When it comes to Historic, Duke said explained that they decided to suspend Wilderness Reclamation and Teferi, Time Raveler after seeing their dominanance in Best-of-three Historic on Magic: The Gathering Arena.

Even the powerful Planeswalker card from War of the Spark set was banned in Brawl format because it appeared in 10% of games, and has one of the highest winrates.

What do you think about these surprising bans and suspensions? Let us know in the comments section below. It looks like I will have to update my Historic Platinum Angel deck. Check out one of my latest streams below:

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