Wizards of the Coast is still planning to make a ban and restricted announcement for Magic: The Gathering today but not for the format many players want.
Last week, WotC announced that they're planning to do off-cycle ban and restricted updates for the new PIoneer format starting today, but some fans are still wondering if there's going to be one since the publisher stil hasn't made the announcement yet. Today, Senior Designer Aaron Forsythe took it to Twitter to remind fans when the B&R announcement will be made for Pioneer.
"Pioneer announcement will be out later in the day," Forsythe said. "We aren't finalizing anything until lunchtime Pacific."
Forsythe went on to explain that they will be making announcements even if no changes are being made. "Since organizations are already committing to tabletop events despite this, we're going to just make banned list announcements/changes on Mondays instead of at any time," Forsythe tweeted. " We'll announce every Monday afternoon, even if we do nothing."
Currenlty, only the five fetchlands are the only cards in Pioneer: "Bloodstained Mire", "Flooded Strand", "Polluted Delta", "Windswept Heath", and "Wooded Foothills", but it looks like that's soon about to change with the new bannings.
In last week's episode of DailyMTG, 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:
Magic: The Gathering Pioneer Players Private group · 2,986 members Join Group A group for Magic: The Gathering Pioneer Format discussion, news, deck tips, strategy, rules help, memes and more! For general MTG discussion, post he... |
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