Keeping the Pioneer format both fresh and fun has been a difficult challenge for the staff at Wizards of the Coast (WotC), but it is one that I’m confident they’ve gotten right up until this point. While I might not entirely agree with the timeline in which they make decisions, the actual decisions they made to improve the health of the format have been excellent. For example, I don’t think many people would have considered banning Oath of Nissa, but in hindsight it was a really smart ban. Now if you want to argue on why it was banned before Once Upon a Time…
As we enter into this new age of standardized banning announcements for Pioneer instead of the week-to-week health checkups, the time it takes to solve potential problems has changed dramatically. For example, I have considered Dimir Inverter a little too good for a while now. Dig Through Time makes it an incredibly consistent control deck with a combo finish. In a lot of ways, it functions like Copy Cat or Splinter Twin, giving you a tight combo package that allows you to play a regular game of Magic until you’re ready to deploy your two-card kill.
In this new era of Banned List management, WotC has implemented a strategy to “announce an announcement” a week before they’re going to take action (potentially) in one of their formats. That’s it. No hints at what format is getting hit. No hint at what cards are getting the axe. Instead, we’re left wondering what’s going to get the hammer for an entire week. So why not speculate on what we think is going to change?
I want to start by saying that I’ve been enjoying the current state of the Pioneer format. As someone who has not enjoyed playing with or against combo very much, I’ve had some success working with various forms of Mono-Red Aggro to help defeat these combo decks. Both Lotus Breach and Dimir Inverter are powerful and relatively hard to interact with, but they can be beaten if you put in enough time and effort. Whether or not that effort is warranted as opposed to format-warping is a matter of perspective.
In today’s article, we’ll be diving into potential ban scenarios, ranging from Light Touch to Scorched Earth.
A Light Touch
When banning cards in a given format, you can choose to permanently eliminate a problematic interaction, or you can ban something that might be putting a seemingly powerful deck over the top. Weakening but not killing a strategy is something we’ve seen a few times over the last decade. With the printing of Deathrite Shaman, Modern Jund decks became far too powerful. That consistent mana accelerant plays a great late-game, and was just a sick addition for a midrange strategy. But since the card was new and they wanted to give it time to breathe, they decided to ban Bloodbraid Elf instead of Deathrite Shaman. Unfortunately, the problem persisted, with Jund’s win percentage being outrageous, and eventually they banned Deathrite Shaman too. In my opinion, this is the worst-case scenario.
We also saw this with both Ponder and Preordain during the opening months of the Modern format, as various forms of blue combo all had the same thing in common: playing eight of this effect to help smooth out and homogenize every single draw. And while I like Ponder and Preordain, I can also acknowledge that both are likely too powerful for the Modern format, if only because there’s too much strength in the format to give it that kind of consistency. In some ways, Once Upon a Time and Ancient Stirrings mimic this behavior, which has caused quite a ruckus in Modern ban discussion.
This time around, I think most people are aware that the two-card combo of Inverter of Truth combined with either Thassa’s Oracle or Jace, Wielder of Mysteries is okay for the format. It’s a cheeser, for sure, but one that requires some amount of danger and planning. The ridiculous part of the deck is that you get to use Dig Through Time to shrink your graveyard after digging for combo pieces. So why not examine that as the problem card instead of the combo itself?
Scenario One: Ban Dig Through Time
In the past, Dig Through Time has been a major problem across multiple formats. The difference this time was supposed to be that banning fetchlands made all delve spells worse. To an extent, that logic was and still is somewhat correct. However, the abusable nature of Dig Through Time keeps leading us back to one combo deck or another. It’s a shame that the other big combo deck in the format doesn’t rely on it heavily, otherwise banning just Dig Through Time would be a slam dunk.
The danger of just banning Dig Through Time is that Treasure Cruise could become a replacement in the Dimir Inverter deck. Much like banning Bloodbraid Elf was supposed to stem the bleeding, banning Dig Through Time could leave the format in a place where they need to ban something else down the line.
I love the idea of replacing Dig Through Time with Treasure Cruise in the Dimir Inverter decks, because that will ultimately give them a powerful tool to recoup resources after an intense exchange while also leaving them with a powerful way to exile their own graveyard to make Inverter of Truth playable. Drawing three cards versus digging through seven looking for the best two is a major difference, and will drastically alter how the deck is built and played. I could even see more hybrid midrange versions that play both Treasure Cruise and Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath to gain a lot of card advantage while blasting all your creatures and making you discard a bunch of cards.
Scenario Two: Ban Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise
In the past, banning one of these and not the other has led to some disastrous weeks. The Legacy format suffered a great deal because of this failure to understand just how easily one of these can replace the other. However, after much consideration, I feel like Treasure Cruise is powerful, but fine for the format. I think it would be a mistake to ban both of these cards at this time, as Treasure Cruise has had opportunity to become problematic but has yet to prove itself.
If you banned both Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time, you certainly would ensure that big blue draw spells aren’t going to be as much of a thing in Pioneer, but I would argue that far more cards in Pioneer have caused problems, whereas only Dig Through Time has felt like it has been stepping out of line.
I would argue that Treasure Cruise is likely worse than Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath, as various Sultai decks have the option to play either, and regularly choose Uro. Obviously the cost is more prohibitive, and stuff like Izzet Phoenix can put Treasure Cruise to good use, but isn’t that okay? Izzet Phoenix is barely a blip on the Pioneer radar at this point, and leaving combo decks in the format helps to ensure that decks without the “correct” type of interaction can’t compete with stuff like Dimir Inverter or Lotus Breach.
Bring the Hammer Down
The alternate method of banning cards is one that I’m usually a big fan of, as it shows that you recognize a problematic interaction and are unwilling to let it continue wreaking havoc on a given format. At the moment, the two cards doing that in Pioneer are Inverter of Truth and Underworld Breach.
Scenario 3: Ban Underworld Breach and Inverter of Truth
Underworld Breach is just egregious. It’s causing problems in both Modern and Legacy. I honestly think it’s more powerful than Yawgmoth’s Will, as it creates far more deterministic kills. I just don’t understand how something this cheap and obviously broken made it through the testing process. This is another one of those “2019-style” designs that deserves to be unprinted. In my humble opinion, let’s bury these in the desert alongside all those forgotten E.T. games.
I like combo players having access to this style of card, but Underworld Breach is just too aggressively costed. My motto is that if you make an unplayable draft common playable, like Tome Scour, you’re probably doing something too weird or broken to be considered healthy. And it’s not like Tome Scour is some strange effect that you can’t find anywhere else. Self-mill has been a thing forever. But the fact that some innocuous effect like “mill myself for five cards” becomes a deterministic kill just blows me away.
Regardless, the numbers for Lotus Breach aren’t exactly through the roof at the moment. It’s an excellent deck, but one that sacrifices both the maindeck and sideboard to exist. It’s hated out by Damping Sphere on two levels. An aggro deck with Eidolon of the Great Revel or some other hate card can be enough to knock them out. But, and this is a very big “but,” I absolutely think any deck that “steals time” from the opponent has no place in any Magic format.
Combo decks that soak up time so that one person ends up with over 66% of actions taken or time played are not okay to me. When you force one person to sit there for ten minutes while you try to find a kill, it’s just awkward and embarrassing. No one wants to lose for ten minutes straight. No one wants to sit there for ten minutes while the opponent tries to figure out how their deck actually works. No one deserves that type of torture.
Inverter of Truth is certainly a card they could ban, and it is the unique element in the archetype. Both Jace, Wielder of Mysteries and Thassa’s Oracle do similar things, and I’ve won too many games with Jace to think banning Thassa’s Oracle will do much of anything. If you do ban Thassa’s Oracle, you could potentially make the deck slightly weaker, but then it would just become a much more nuanced control deck with a tight combo finish package, and instead of having Thassa’s Oracle to gum up the ground, you probably have to play more removal or some alternate win condition like Pack Rat.
Banning Inverter of Truth makes some sense, if only because it will kill the deck outright. The existence of Inverter of Truth, like Splinter Twin before it, effectively invalidates any other Dimir Control-style shell because the combo itself is too easy to assemble and too difficult to interact with. Leaving the combo on the back lines is too much of a spew.
But handling Banned Lists like this might be too much for some people to handle. If you ban Dig Through Time, those who own an Inverter of Truth deck get to keep playing the game. Things will change dramatically, but the archetype can still function and will likely still be a major part of the Pioneer metagame.
Taking this scorched-earth scenario to its final form, banning both Inverter of Truth and Underworld Breach would “reset” the format back to how it was before Theros Beyond Death except that Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath is around and wreaking havoc on any and all midrange and aggressive opponents. Personally, I quite like the idea of keeping some amount of combo in the format as a way check these midrange decks. Uro is an absurdly powerful card that we really haven’t gotten to see much of yet in Pioneer because these combo decks are keeping it down. But if we ban all of those combos, I feel there’s a good chance we have to ban Uro in a few weeks or months.
From Left Field
Scenario 4: Unbans
I doubt that this scenario comes true because all of the cards currently on the Banned List were put there for a very good reason. Even Oath of Nissa, a seemingly innocuous card, could be a disaster when put in a Kethis, the Hidden Hand combo deck. But mostly it just makes the green midrange and ramp decks more consistent. There are a ton of creatures that help ramp and enough lands that pay you off for ramping that unbanning it would be a dangerous idea.
I’ve seen people advocating for unbanning things like Felidar Guardian because they’re “just as bad” as Inverter or Breach. But why would you swallow the spider to catch the fly? Escalation is something we can avoid. I’d argue that unbanning a more “fair” card like Oko, Thief of Crowns is more defensible, if only because unbanning a combo deck to fight a combo deck just sounds miserable. I’d liken it to unbanning Jace, the Mind Sculptor in Modern, something I advocated for quite some time. Modern is a horror show full of linear interactions, so unbanning something that gives you a heavy incentive to interact with the opponent is a smart move.
I want to be clear – I think this is currently a bad idea for Pioneer. We just got finished with Oko. Like Underworld Breach, I’d bury them all in the desert before I would unban them. But exploring all the possibilities is important.
My Prediction
The “announcement for an announcement” thing that they’ve started doing for the B&R List is baffling to some, but it makes a lot of sense to me as long as they’re specifically spending that week going over these scenarios to make the best decision possible. For example, if they know there’s a problem, and it isn’t as simple as “ban Inverter,” I’m very happy they would spend a week to make the best decision possible.
This is one of the more difficult banning decisions WotC has had to make. And honestly, if they banned nothing, I wouldn’t be surprised. This ban announcement isn’t even guaranteed to affect Pioneer. They might just be solving the Primeval Titan or Underworld Breach problem in Modern. But if they do end up banning something in Pioneer, my prediction is simply this:
Ban Dig Through Time only.
Let Inverter try to adapt with Uro or Treasure Cruise or (gasp) Tasigur, the Golden Fang! There are plenty of delve spells to replace Dig Through Time, and they would make the deck significantly different and less combo-oriented. Murderous Cut or even Gurmag Angler could see some play in the archetype, which is honestly pretty cool.
Treasure Cruise is likely going to be the first card to take the slot, but I still think that would make the deck a lot weaker. In my personal experience, playing Thoughtseize alongside a bunch of raw card advantage spells is mediocre. Drawing those extra cards as the game progresses usually means you have more resources at your disposal, but the reality is that you’re drawing 1/3 lands and 1/3 interaction, and some of that interaction can be worthless or suffer diminishing returns. Dig Through Time allows you to sidestep all those extra lands and discard spells in favor of finding more specific interaction or combo pieces.
As someone who loves Dig Through Time and despises Inverter of Truth, you can rest assured that my opinion here is completely unbiased. Dig Through Time is an unreasonable Magic card, and one that I will be sad to see go, but I also understand that we need to Ol’ Yeller the damn thing. My longstanding friendship with Dig Through Time is canceled.
I would keep an eye on the format, including the win percentage of both Dimir Inverter and Lotus Breach, because they may require further action. But banning decks outright shouldn’t be the norm. It’s been tough watching every new set introduce problems to Modern and Pioneer, but it’s clear that this is the new design direction. Powerful stuff sells packs and pack sales haven’t exactly decreased in the last few years. It’s more ban fatigue than anything that has people down and it needs to be addressed.
I think banning exactly Dig Through Time allows people to keep playing all the same decks but finally rids us of an outrageously powerful card that probably should have been banned at the format’s inception. I’m happy I got to play with it again, but the sun’s getting really low.