It’s that time of year again! This quarter’s Banned and Restricted announcement crept up on us – most people didn’t even know there was one until last week – but left us with some big news to digest and another missed opportunity to bemoan.
Modern: Violent Outburst is banned.
After a surprisingly long period of stability following Modern Horizons 2, bans and unbans are the talk of the town in Modern again. The removal of Fury and Up the Beanstalk prompted a heated debate that was still raging at the time of this announcement, and you can expect to see this one discussed and relitigated for a long time too.
This ban is more than a quick fix aimed at a single card. It sends a bulldozer at one of the pillars of current Modern. The ‘Cascade decks’ as a group have been one of Modern’s main characters since Modern Horizons 2 – players figured out that cascading into Crashing Footfalls was realistic as soon as the set released, and Living End had been one of Modern’s court jesters for a decade before that, causing no complaints until this critical mass of free spells pushed it over the edge.
With another set of new tools from The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth and the previous bans cutting the competition down to size, Temur Rhinos became the default best deck – and Living End predictably joined it as the Rhinos deck’s main predator and one of the most powerful decks in the abstract.
The Free Spell Factor
This made the most tiresome and repetitive aspects of the Cascade decks impossible to ignore. There’s no shame in basing your deck around a specific card – the leading role in Five-Color Creativity or Golgari Yawgmoth is easy to guess – but the cascade setup made these decks highly redundant, and the influx of pitch spells and other cards that lie about their real cost made it easy to do this one thing every game without paying a real price for it.
Strong free spells define the play patterns of a format but Violent Outburst adds a uniquely offensive context here by letting you use Force of Negation proactively to defend your game-changing payoff spell on the opponent’s turn. That might be palatable if Force of Negation were the only culprit, but there’s also Subtlety in the same colour, as well as Grief in Living End and situational but effective tools like Endurance and Force of Vigor. When the proactive and interactive parts of these decks are both this repetitive, it’s hard to tolerate them for long.
Other recent bans – such as Karn, the Great Creator in Pioneer – displayed a willingness to target cards blamed for negative experiences, even if they weren’t winning too much in the process. The Violent Outburst decks certainly caused many violent outbursts among their victims, but also boasted alarming win rates over the past few months. This move was just a matter of time.
The Road Not Taken
A more radical but perhaps more natural fix would be to clean up the rules for the cascade mechanic. It felt bizarre that you could cascade into a double-faced card and cast the ‘wrong’ side, and the Valki, God of Lies / Tibalt, Cosmic Impostor debacle showed how dangerous that could be, but it’s not necessarily more intuitive that you can hit a card like Living End that officially doesn’t have a mana cost or skip a card like Fire // Ice where one or both halves would stop the count by themselves (especially when this used to work the other way – and that was exploited by mischievous cascaders too!). Updating the rules to have Living End and friends fail this check would have an obvious motive but also be a useful precedent.
Ask the average Modern player at your LGS, and you’re likely to hear a long diatribe on why some card obviously deserve a ban and its mere existence is a sign of the capitalist vultures in Renton killing Modern to chase a profit. They just can’t seem to agree with each other on what that card is. For everyone who breathed a sigh of relief when Fury got the axe, there was someone harrumphing that Grief should go instead. The One Ring and Orcish Bowmasters are far less popular than they were at their Pro Tour debut last summer, but each has a vocal group of haters who want to see them cast into Mount Doom as soon as possible.
Complaints like this aren’t totally baseless – as we learned in Throne of Eldraine Standard, it’s easy for problematic cards to hide behind even more glaring offenders and get their own supervillain arc when given the chance. You can make a case for sweeping, structural changes in Modern, but this should come with an understanding that the terms of engagement have changed. You won’t get the experience of 2014 or 2018 Modern back, and it’s not reasonable to expect that.
The Looming Shift
Of course, another earthquake is about to hit Modern in just a few months. However the format shifts in the wake of this announcement, Modern Horizons 3 may change that landscape entirely. You could see that as a reason to wait – perhaps this set will fix that problem by itself – or as another reason to follow through – it’s a bad look if the set comes in low and the promising new cards can’t cut it against Crashing Footfalls and Living End or whatever the next menace is.
Modern Horizons dropped on a format that was popular and seemingly healthy but already starting to crack. Modern Horizons 2 came along when Modern was more stale than ever and breathed new life into it. Perhaps Modern Horizons 3 will be just what a restless and jaded Modern fanbase needs to start again.
Post-Ban Metagame Realignments
Where does the Outburst ban leave the other top dogs in Modern for now?
Don’t count Cascade out just yet! Temur Rhinos as we know it is off the table, but more colourful lists touching white for Leyline Binding and Teferi, Time Raveler popped up occasionally, and the flashy new Leyline of the Guildpact + Scion of Draco package made that the default approach for this round of Regional Championships. Violent Outburst being an instant gave it a unique flexibility that also made Force of Negation better, but Ardent Plea does the job and even pitches to Force or Subtlety in a pinch. With this backup plan, you aren’t as reliant on cascading to win the game, and so this downgrade is less meaningful.
The future is more uncertain for Living End. Threatening that sweeper effect at any time was a big part of the card’s power, and you can’t commit a crime (in the new mechanic sense or the ethical sense) by triggering Grief in their draw step any more. The rest of that formula is still outrageously powerful, but opponents now have more room to fight back on their own turn with relevant creatures or sorcery-speed answers, and that’s a welcome change.
Golgari Yawgmoth has enjoyed its view from the top tier of Modern since Wilds of Eldraine, but the Rhinos resurgence called an abrupt halt to that. That has always been Yawgmoth’s nightmare matchup, and you need to be very confident against everything else to justify a poor matchup against the best deck.
Similarly, Amulet Titan is a proven and powerful deck, but it faced an uphill battle against these fully powered Cascade decks. If they have to operate more at sorcery speed, it’s much easier for a skilled Titan player to find a window to stick a threat.
Decks like Esper Goryo’s Vengeance rose from obscurity in recent weeks largely because they are naturally favoured against all forms of Cascade. If those die with Violent Outburst, these decks will have to justify why they should stick around.
Beyond Modern, this Banned and Restricted announcement took a quick tour of the other formats, with the only other change coming in the most unlikely of places.
Vintage: Ponder is unrestricted.
In an unexpected but welcome act of decluttering, Ponder is unrestricted in Vintage. It was restricted over fifteen years ago in the same wave of bans that took out Brainstorm and Gush, as well as all-time combo great Flash and former staple Merchant Scroll. All of those other cards would revolutionize the format if unrestricted, but Ponder is… fine.
Enough strong means of card selection have debuted since 2008 that many blue decks in Vintage didn’t even bother with the one Ponder they could play. Cantrip-heavy decks like Doomsday will welcome this change, and cards like Dreadhorde Arcanist look more appealing when you can fill up on Ponder, but I expect this to look oddly similar to the unbanning of Preordain in Modern: a move that seemed unthinkable for a long time but quickly seemed natural once it happened and players felt its impact.
Standard: No changes.
Previous announcements made clear that Standard bans outside the yearly fall rotation would only occur in an emergency. Standard is thriving right now, and I hope it shines on the big stage next month at Pro Tour Outlaws of Thunder Junction.
Legacy: No changes.
Legacy is in a much stranger place. The announcement calls out Orcish Bowmasters by name, but that card has mostly settled as a tool for blue decks to fight each other.
Right now, Legacy players are more likely to share their Modern cousins’ concerns about Grief. The main Bowmasters shell is a Dimir deck that can use Reanimate and Animate Dead as the main win condition in a fair game, doubling down on Grief on Turn 1 or buying back Troll of Khazad-Dum, but can also chase the high of Entomb into Reanimate for Atraxa, Grand Unifier or Archon of Cruelty.
Classic Reanimator is popular and successful too, but has all those usual issues with graveyard hate. This new hybrid can punish anyone who moves all-in on Leyline of the Void by Brainstorming away their dead cards and beating down with Orcish Bowmasters or Dauthi Voidwalker.
At the same time, the rest of the format is becoming more ruthlessly efficient as Ancient Tomb powers out a dizzying array of must-answer threats that were not balanced with Legacy – or competitive Constructed at all – in mind. ________ Goblin is the latest, strangest example – nobody, casual or competitive, asked for or enjoys the sticker gimmick as far as I can tell – but baffling mistakes like the initiative are always ready to remind unfortunate Legacy boomers that the game has changed a lot since they were in their prime.
Pioneer: No changes…?!
The hardest part of writing these articles is finding a new way to make the same points about Izzet Phoenix and Treasure Cruise yet again. If a dominant performance at the Pro Tour wasn’t enough to change any minds, I don’t know what will be – and you can pencil in Phoenix as a top contender for the next Pioneer Pro Tour in 2025 and every Pioneer RC and RCQ season until then.
