Magic: The Gathering Pioneer Format is Getting Its First Ban & Restricted Update Soon

Just a couple of weeks after Wizards of the Coast announced the new nonrotating Magic: The Gathering format called Pioneer, the company re-clarified that they're planning to do off-cycle ban and restricted updates for the new format, and the first one is coming soon.

Over on Twitter, the official MTG account announced that they will be making ban and restricted changes for Pioneer on Mondays, starting on November 4. So far, the Pioneer banlist only includes the five fetchlands: "Bloodstained Mire", "Flooded Strand", "Polluted Delta", "Windswept Heath", and "Wooded Foothills", but it looks like that's soon about to change. After all, Pioneer has powerful cards that were banned in other formats before like "Deathrite Shaman", "Emrakul, the Promised End", "Aetherworks Marvel", and "Felidar Guardian".

The tweet echoes what Senior Designers Aaron Forsythe and Max McCall said during last Monday's episode of DailyMTG, where they talked about the development of Pioneer and explained why they only banned five cards. They said that they are letting players explore the new format in Magic Online as if it's an open Wild West before they can determine which cards are too powerful in Pioneer, so by the end of the year, when they start doing Pioneer tournaments on paper, they would feel more confident about the new format. He went on to say that they are deliberately willing to ban cards within just weeks during the format's early period.

Forsythe explained that even if the MTG designers spend a lot of time arguing, researching, and playing a bunch of games, they are not going to "come close to the thousands and millions of hours of games and decks that are actually going to determine what's too powerful in this format", so they decided to let players do the exploratory work so they can determine which cards are worth banning.

It looks like many MTG players are loving Pioneer so far. You can check out their intitial reactions online here. Two major Magic tournaments even changed their formats from Standard to Pioneer recently, which shows that Pioneer has great potential to be a fan-favorite nonrotating format just like Modern, and this also shows that Standard is not in a good state right now because of the overpowered dominance of "Oko, Thief of Crowns".

Hopefully, Oko won't ruin Pioneer as well. After all, the Throne of Eldraine Planeswalker is one of the most expensive cards legal in Pioneer right now.

Which cards do you think will get banned or restricted first in Pioneer? Let us know in the comments section below, and don't forget to join the most active Pioneer Facebook group below:

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