Over decades of competitive play, many a Magic card has either fallen out of valid use or been outright banned from official play altogether. But as Wizards of the Coast seeks to overhaul some formats of the games’ approach to potentially powerful cards, in one format it’s trying a new one entirely: straight up unbanning cards for the first time in its history.
Today Wizards of the Coast announced two “trial unbans” for the Pauper format, Magic‘s common-cards-only competitive format that has been around for the best part of two decades at this point, but began being officially supported by a WOTC rules panel in 2022. High Tide—a blue card that lets its caster double up on resources for every Island resource they tap, and has been been banned since Pauper’s online and tabletop banlists were consolidated and unified in 2019, and Prophetic Wisdom—a colorless artifact banned in 2022 that players could pay a cost and tap to add any color of mana to their resource pool—will be the first cards to go under the trial period.
The trials will see High Tide and Prophetic Wisdom become legal until the next banning and restriction announcement by Wizards, and until then developers will examine and take feedback as to whether or not the cards should be re-banned or enter legality for Pauper going forward. Going forward, future potential unbans experimented by the format may not face a similar trial period.
“No other format has really tried this, and we think Pauper is a great place to experiment. You should not expect to see this in any other formats, and it’s something the PFP [Pauper Format Panel] is specifically interested in and thinks Pauper can handle given the accessibility of building decks and the predominance of online play,” PFP member and Magic principle game designer Gavin Verhey said in the accompanying blog post explaining the decision.
Although Wizards has not tried unbanning cards from any of its Magic formats before this, the potential of the idea has been floated for years. But while, for now, Pauper is going to be the only format that experiments with bannings at all, the move comes in the wake of a significant amount of upheaval around banlists in one of the game’s other incredibly popular formats, Commander. Last year, Wizards formally dissolved Commander’s long-running community-led Rules Committee, after an uproar over banning the cards Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus, and Mana Crypt from Commander saw members of the CRC targeted with harassments and death threats.
Wizard’s direct control over the future of the Commander format, and an attempt to stabilize the community after the controversy, led to the creation of a new five-tier power system, Brackets, to encourage players to discuss the competitiveness of their decks. It also led to this year’s introduction of the “Game Changers” list, a series of powerful cards legal in the format, but the presence of one in more in your deck would define where they sat in the top three tiers of the new Bracket system. At the time, Wizards floated that while the Game Changers list wasn’t necessarily a future indicator of cards that were guaranteed to be going to be banned, it could potentially be an avenue for banned cards in the format to re-enter some form of competitive legality by being reverted to Game Changer status.
“[Game Changers] creates a nice half-step between the banned list and showing up everywhere. It also really helps ensure that you know what cards we have our eyes on so cards won’t feel like they’re banned out of nowhere in the future,” Verhey wrote in the blog post announcing the system at the time. “It also gives us a tool to unban cards to try them or nudge around cards without a ban needed. If a card shows up and is frustrating at casual tables but fine by competitive players, we can add it to the Game Changers list in an update to get it to the right place.”
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