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Surprise Banned & Restricted Announcement Hits Two Legacy Staples

Two pillars of the current Legacy metagame get the ban hammer

Expressive Iteration, illustrated by Anastasia Ovchinnikova

Wizards of the Coast (WotC) started off the week with a surprise Magic: The Gathering Banned & Restricted announcement, targeted at the Legacy format.

As of today, both Expressive Iteration and White Plume Adventurer are banned in Legacy.

Expressive Iteration White Plume Adventurer

An uncommon all-star from Strixhaven, School of Mages, Expressive Iteration has already been banned in Pioneer and now Legacy as well. According to WotC, Expressive Iteration is the tool that allows Izzet Delver to “easily adapt to stay on top of any changes in the metagame…” and by removing it, hope that its dominance will drop and open the door for more innovation in the format.

A newer addition to Legacy, White Plume Adventurer fuels the format’s second most popular deck and abuses the initiative mechanic to create an early advantage that is “difficult to recover from.” In an effort to “reduce the consistency and speed of this gameplay pattern,” WotC is removing White Plume Adventurer from the equation.

While data shows that Izzet Delver and Mono-White Initiative are keeping each other in check, the rest of the format is suffering, and so removing both White Plume Adventurer and Expressive Iteration will ideally shake up the format enough to give rise to a healthier metagame.

According to WotC, the other constructed formats they monitor (Standard, Modern, Pioneer and Vintage) all appear to be in good spots, with diverse metagames and no one deck producing problematic win-rates.

Read the original article from WotC.