To paraphrase a mildly-inappropriate-for-print tweet from Pro Tour Champion Allen Wu:
And my similarly filtered response to Allen:
I’m done with Yorion.
I’m so done with Yorion.
Nothing to do with Yorion is fun.
Nothing to do with Yorion is fair.
Creatures (10)
Lands (36)
Spells (34)
Nothing to do with Yorion is unique no matter what format you play it in.
Yorion, more than any other companion, is an egregious mistake. Regardless of what happens with that mechanic, Yorion should be excised from the game as completely as Oko was and with significantly less delay. Alternatively, I would accept “fired from a cannon into the sun.”
The Scope of the Problem
Yorion Jeskai Lukka is the best deck in Ikoria Standard by miles.
It’s also among the best decks in Pioneer, along with Yorion Dimir Inverter, Yorion Azorius Control, and white-based Devotion.
In Modern, it’s Yorion Scapeshift and Yorion Uroza.
In Legacy, it’s Yorion Four-Color Snow and is probably the best version of that deck.
Apparently Historic is a thing too? Don’t ask me what’s going on with Yorion there, besides it appearing to be the best thing along with Nexus of Fate or Field of the Dead or some other horrible card that for some reason was only suspended or delayed or whatever they call “briefly banning a card and making a bad decision to not keep it banned later.”
The numbers do swing from utterly suffocating to possibly reasonable as you start hitting the Modern or Legacy range, but the quality of gameplay doesn’t improve. Here’s how every single Yorion deck operates:
- Cast some permanents that cost basically nothing and don’t do anything besides move some cardboard around when they enter the battlefield.
- Play a bit of interaction.
- Threaten some medium-broken gameplan to establish a False Tempo setup.
- If they start interacting and things bog down, fire off a Yorion, amass a ton of cards, and end the game.
As I said last week, the only real way to exploit it is to do something that utterly ignores their gameplay and hope that splash of interaction doesn’t line up with your plan or that their moderately broken gameplan doesn’t just get you anyway.
What Went Horribly Wrong with Yorion: Anatomy of a Threat
We’ve already seen the worst of companion with Lurrus of the Dream-Den being banned in Legacy and Vintage after taking up the majority of the format, but as I Tweeted above, playing with Lurrus in Pioneer and even Modern is fairly interesting.
What’s the difference between the formats?
It’s just the obvious fail case with these companion designs. So many of them are giant card advantage engines stapled to an incidental way to win the game.
Most threats have a drawback, as in you literally draw them in your hand when you need something else and you wish you could put them back. Maybe you needed a land to even cast them, or an interactive spell to survive long enough.
We used to live in a world where you even had to choose between size and impact on clogged battlefields against raw card advantage, but that’s just a joke of the past in 2020 Magic design. The next step is obviously that you don’t even have to spend a drawn card on your threat. You can just play all interaction and lands and cantrips, cast Yorion, and let your resources just spiral out into a clean victory.
There are also threats that don’t cost you a real card to commit to, like creature-lands or threats that act as immediate interaction, but they don’t operate on the scale that Yorion does. They are a single threat that dies to removal, a single card of bonus value, or something like Torrential Gearhulk that costs a million mana and lies dead in your hand for half the game.
Yorion is just there. It always shows up, costs you nothing to have hanging around, generates massive amounts of card advantage, and even immediately impacts the battlefield.
What Made Yorion a Total Disaster: Deckbuilding
There are companions other than Yorion or Lurrus that follow this pattern of playing random cardboard before casting your companion and then suddenly gaining a massive tangible advantage, but they aren’t quite the same.
There just isn’t an actual restriction to what you’re doing with Yorion the way there is with Keruga or Lurrus, or at least non-Mishra’s Bauble Lurrus. You just effectively have a maximum of three copies of each card when you translate to 80 cards. That’s not like Keruga being unable to play early cantrips, or Lurrus being unable to play larger mirror-breakers resulting in things like it getting chased out of Standard by Mayhem Devil Obosh decks.
If you think about what three copies of a card means in normal 60-card deckbuilding, that’s usually the number for things you don’t really want a second copy of but still want to draw often. Maybe you do want to draw a second Arcum’s Astrolabe, but it’s not the end of the world if it’s a different similar cantrip. Honestly, you probably will draw a second copy a lot more than expected since so many of your extra cards are these cantrips.
When you’re trying to play a lot of these small package, moderately broken game plans, you often even have a card you don’t want to draw multiples of because the first should end the game. Is it even a drawback to play four copies of Scapeshift but draw the second copy less often?
Again, the real cost to play Yorion comes in sideboard counts. If you need more than a couple of a given card for a matchup, you need to use a lot more sideboard space than normal to hit that metric.
And that only matters if you aren’t already starting off with good cards for that matchup. Adding a few extra sideboard sweepers to the copies of Shatter the Sky or Supreme Verdict you were already playing isn’t a huge effort.
The only real cost to building around Yorion is you’re worse against Dredge. Or Lotus Breach. Or whatever that equivalent is in your format of choice.
Why Does Yorion Even Exist: Precedent of Effect
There have been a fair number of blink effects stapled to creatures. But has there even been a Yorion before?
There have been equivalent effects of even the weirder companions like Lutri, the Spellchaser and Zirda, the Dawnwaker. Lurrus being able to recur Mishra’s Bauble is unprecedented, but just a small repeated Raise Dead certainly isn’t.
Is the closest thing to Yorion the trigger on Brago, King Eternal that requires a full turn cycle to come online? Are there even other mass blink effects attached to a creature?
Restoration Angel saw regular Modern play, or at least it did until 2019. Look at Yorion. Then look at Restoration Angel. Why does this card exist at such an upgrade?
You would think the lesson about blinking planeswalkers would have been learned already, but here we are yet again using Yorion to reset Teferi to reset Yorion to… oh gosh we broke the loop. We’re learning the same thing about enchantments and artifacts too this time, since we get to incidentally pick those up along with everything else.
We’re also learning the hard way that blinking everything on a permanent leads to miserable loops. Everything happens on your end step, then theirs, then yours, or you just bounce Yorion and recast it, and then you draw all these cards and have no idea what to do with it all and why hasn’t your opponent scooped yet?
Why Yorion Shouldn’t Exist: Interacting With the Card
I don’t think any of the previous points I made is enough to say Yorion should get banned. A new level of blinking isn’t necessarily egregious. Sure, it opens up some weird avenues, but that alone isn’t it.
A threat that costs almost nothing to exist isn’t necessarily an issue either. Maybe Yorion subsidizes a lot of things a little more than before, but whatever that could exist.
A companion that has minimal cost…. well that’s fairly inexcusable, but you can have Jegantha, the Wellspring exist and not necessarily be imminently ban-worthy as we wait on R&D to come up with a companion fix or decide the mechanic should take a break while they work on one.
But holy crap is playing against Yorion miserable.
Your opponent is eventually going to cast Yorion, because they always have their companion because the mechanic is stupid. You can’t Thoughtseize it. They can’t lock it under a Grafdigger’s Cage or Relic of Progenitus like with Lurrus. It’s just there.
Maybe you can interact with Yorion on the stack, maybe you can’t. This might be the fault of Teferi, Time Raveler doing weird things to many formats when it resolves, but Teferi wasn’t breaking formats en masse the way Yorion is, so trying to shift the blame there isn’t going to work. Even if Teferi isn’t on the battlefield, are you just going to sit with mana up forever and never counter their normal cards drawn and cast?
That’s what the whole False Tempo gameplan also enforces. Your opponent has to interact with your other relevant plays, and when everything should have attritioned down to nothing, you have Yorion and it’s just over.
What about interacting on the axis of the cards that set up Yorion? Nope.
I’ve mentioned Obosh a few times in this article and it shares a lot of factors with Yorion. It’s a unique high-end threat, unlike Embercleave you never draw two or zero, and it works with cards you already wanted to play with low deckbuilding cost.
But when your opponent casts Fervent Champion and you kill it, you have exchanged a card for a card. That just doesn’t work with Arcum’s Astrolabe, Omen of the Sea, or all the things you can Yorion for value. Spending a card on answering them preemptively gives your Yorion opponent the exact bonus two-for-one they were hoping for.
Traditionally, playing a blink effect in Constructed is about maximizing the individual card you’re casting. It isn’t inherently worth a card, so you’re maximizing what the thing you’re blinking does. You blink Eternal Witness because repeating Regrowth is insane or Stonehorn Dignitary because you hate fun.
But when the rate is so subsidized that you aren’t spending a card on it, and when you blink many things at once, there’s no reason to find higher-cost unique effects. You just blink in bulk whatever cards you would normally play that provide some chip-shot advantage. There’s no specific setup or advantage or investment. You just get some arbitrary sum of raw cardboard moving around, and maybe that’s enough.
Maybe you can overcome a Mulldrifter with good positioning, or land ratios, or another two-for-one earlier. Even if it’s three cards, you can fight it, but Yorion is so much more. You have to remove Yorion after it resolves, again just walking right into the card advantage game it sets up, or they will trigger Yorion again. Whether it’s a Teferi bounce or another blink effect, letting Yorion sit around only leads to a worse outcome than the first time around. They drew a bunch of cards off the first Yorion trigger; how many of those are also permanents that add to the blink pile?
There’s also a huge difference between being up a giant stack of cards and just getting ahead one card. You can beat Lurrus of the Dream-Den by just killing it on the spot, accepting that you’re down a card, and moving on with the rest of the game. Being down three cards, four with the kill spell burned on Yorion? Nah, pack it in.
As I keep saying, there’s no way to play a profitable interactive game of Magic against Yorion. You have exactly one spot to interact with Yorion that puts you in a positioning advantage, you can’t interacting with any of the setup for Yorion, and you can’t even hope to keep pace on raw cards with other engines.
This is not good for any format. But worse, it isn’t even unique across the formats.
Take a look at Lurrus. In Ikoria Standard the card enables aggressive strategies full of cards you don’t mind dying. In Pioneer, the same strategies exist but are more combo-oriented. In Modern, you have Mishra’s Bauble but dubious interaction, so the Lurrus decks are much more aggressive. In Legacy and Vintage, where Lurrus is now banned, you had the full-power, no-cost Lurrus experience.
But it is different in each format.
Like I said at the start, the Yorion decks across the formats are all indistinguishable. The interaction is basically all the same. The things you are blinking are all the same. The impact of your broken alternative gameplan is all the same.
This is not good for Magic. We’ve seen this cross-format ubiquity cause complaints many times over the last year due to power creep, but few of the cards have quite reached the confluence of misery and errors that Yorion has.
This jerk sure did. At least Once Upon a Time enabled decks unique to each format.
Legacy might stand a chance on the basis of five-mana spells being punished on mana cost heavily, even if Arcum’s Astrolabe makes Wasteland a joke.
But the other formats?
Just ban Yorion. Let us play unique Magic formats again. Let us play interactive Magic again.
Or give us a break from companion in general, but that’s a topic for a different day.
Maybe just the ones that don’t have a real deckbuilding cost. Let’s start with Yorion and see how it goes.