Standard and the Bans Dilemma

About a month ago, professional player and game designer Brian Kibler released a video where he discusses the current state of Standard and which cards he would ban to make the format healthier: Monstrous Rage and Up the Beanstalk.

Kibler claims that these cards compress the format. There are many ways to interpret this word, but I like the traditional definition of applying pressure. He has a point: there are cards in formats that will compress the rest of the available pool and the Metagame because they are more efficient alone or in combination than compared to new or old options.

Take, for example, Deadly Dispute. The card was just banned from Pauper because it created the most efficient card advantage engine in the format to the point of homogenizing deckbuilding around its interaction with Ichor Wellspring, making it necessary to have very good reasons to use any other interactions or engines instead.

Monstrous Rage and Up the Beanstalk, along with This Town Ain’t Big Enough, are such examples in Standard. They make up the triad of the best decks in the format (Red Aggro, Domain Overlords, Esper/Dimir Bounce) because, together with the other available cards, they create the most efficient strategies in the format — those that have the best chance of winning tournaments and, consequently, are played the most.

Despite his extensive experience in game design and also in competitive Magic, my personal take is to disagree with Kibler on this regard. Not because I believe he is wrong in his statements, but because card games are made up of this nature of always having some better decks to the detriment of other less efficient strategies, and the means of addressing this problem are always palliative and/or generate worse results on several fronts.

It is possible to remove Monstrous Rage, Up the Beanstalk and This Town Ain’t Big Enough, and we will still have an archetype with better performance than the others in its category and this will be the deck of choice for those who intend to win tournaments. An exchange of X for Y is made, obtaining the same result, and even in the possibility of there being a diversification of archetypes at the top of the competitive chain, this effect does not tend to last in Standard because each set can pull the power creep — just think of what Duskmourn did with the format — and consequently make the scenario revolve around a set, just like Khans of Tarkir did back when it was released.

This is the essence of competitive card games. I recently did an interview for our channel with Carlos Eduardo (Champion of Flesh and Blood's Calling São Paulo), and when we mentioned his choice of deck (Aurora, Shooting Star), he was emphatic in saying that he wanted the archetype that gave him the best odds of winning with the best possible plays.

When we look at the Pokémon TCG universe with the new rotation that started now, in April, what we see most are people trying out the new Tera Box for its wide versatility in the current competitive scene that makes it the potential new S-Tier.

In all cases, players will choose the most efficient decks with the best cards possible if they want to win. Therefore, the idea of ​​banning cards from Standard because they compress the rest of the format seems unreasonable. There will always be one or more decks doing this, and the problem is when one strategy is compressing the rest — this was the case that led to a series of bans in Modern over the last two years.

What exists in Standard is a Metagame. If pieces are removed, the Metagame will continue to exist, change, and not every deck will be able to win or be competitively viable in it. Some archetypes will always be better than many.

To better elaborate on this scenario, let's delve deeper into exactly what the state of Standard is today. Rather than talking about decks, it's more important to address cards in the format today based on the concept of pillars.

Pillars are the cards that define the format and maintain its potential balance. The logic was originally conceived for Vintage, but can be transferred to all competitive formats. Staples like Force of Will and Wasteland, for example, are considered pillars of Legacy for their contribution to preventing degenerate strategies.

Standard's pillars cannot be considered based on what they prevent, but on what they enable and how they dictate the course of matches and the Metagame. Today, we have three major pillars and three minor pillars. They are:

The Major Pillars

Monstrous Rage is the major (but not the only) enabler of almost all Red Aggro in the format. This includes the Prowess lists in Mono Red, Boros, and Gruul and the Mice lists in the same color combinations. Its main function is to deal damage and maintain permanent evasion on a creature while triggering their abilities — while it excels with any creature, it shines when there are micro-interactions possible with it.

What makes Rage stand out in Standard today is the fact that there are so many cards that benefit considerably from it. Take the Mice package, for example: anyone from Heartfire Hero, Emberheart Challenger or even Manifold Mouse can easily become a gigantic threat with a Rage in hand, forcing the opponent to either play around it or make sure to time it right.

The problem with the card is that it does a lot for just one mana. If it were a +3/+1 with Trample only the turn it's cast, Monstrous Rage would already be good enough to warrant maindeck slots for either of these archetypes, but the fact that it permanently grows your creatures, coupled with the various interactions we've mentioned here, makes it almost as good as a Temur Battle Rage in a Death's Shadow (if you haven't played Modern in 2017, that means "as good as winning the game").

Up the Beanstalk could and should be considered a design mistake. It replenishes itself in its owner's hand when it enters and basically helps to play with high mana value cards, but the problem is that there are many low-cost effects in the format like Leyline Binding, Ride's End, This Town Ain't Big Enough, the recently released Rakshasa's Bargain and Kin-Tree Severance, in addition to the entire Duskmourn Overlords cycle, that triggers it for bypassing mana values.

The result is that Beanstalk guarantees recurring card advantage for a very low cost in decks with the ability to play go big, and when these have cheap interaction that interacts with the enchantment, it becomes even worse.

As we can see in both Aetherdrift and Tarkir: Dragonstorm, these alternative costs, reductions, or distinct ways to cast cards with a mana value of five or greater will continue to be released in 2025 and likely for the next two years, making Beanstalk a card that will only become more efficient as new cards are released.

And speaking of more efficiency with each new release, This Town Ain’t Big Enough would be thoroughly ignored in other times and branded as a "draft card", but whose change in Magic’s design philosophy has made it one of the most powerful staples in Standard and Pioneer in recent years.

Magic has become a game where the matches matter more on the board than in the hand. The amount of power plays — cards that you play that have an effect and/or create a game state that your opponent must resolve, or they lose — has become greater in the last six years than it was in the entire time before that, and today every card needs to be exciting, and the best way to ensure that feeling is by making them have an immediate impact.

This is what makes Bounce what it is today. Fear of Isolation, because of this change, has become almost as good as a Snapcaster Mage by the game's current standards. And another certainty we can have is that exciting and powerful ETB effects will continue to exist as long as Magic is a game — after all, it's much more exciting to play and follow a game played on the battlefield than in the secret zone of the players' hands.

In this world, This Town Ain't Big Enough is one of the best replaying effects in the format, in addition to carrying a versatility that is unmatched in Standard or Pioneer today.

The Minor Pillars

Cut Down is the removal that ensures fair play for Midrange. Without it, Red Aggro would have a greater dominance and go-wide decks would have more space, and these, together, could suppress Beanstalk variants.

Its existence ensures the balance of the format and allows Black Midranges to exist in a universe of fast Aggro and Bounce. On the other side of the spectrum, cards like Go for the Throat allow Midrange to exist in a world of Domain Ramp, but still be preyed upon by them.

Stock Up is the most recent pillar and may, in the future, be the most important of them. A mini-Dig Through Time revitalized the format's Control and gave more consistency to blue Midrange and the possibility of combos like Omniscience and Abuelo's Awakening to exist.

It is and will remain the backbone of blue decks for a long time, until more efficient cards emerge. Given that it has found a home even in Legacy, it may become one of the main pillars of Standard post-rotation.

The last pillar is Abhorrent Oculus. Although it doesn't have a function similar to the other cards above, it is one of the best cards to build lists around and win games with the possibility of circumventing its mana cost, enabling strategies and archetypes that have as their main objective “to play Oculus as early as possible and protect it”.

Other cards that could be categorized as important, but don't exactly fit as pillars, are Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, Enduring Curiosity and Unholy Annex as part of the backbone of the Midranges in the format today, Knight-Errant of Eos for the Convoke decks that are today the most successful go wide deck, and Sunfall as the sweeper that every player needs to respect coming from Azorius Control, Domain Ramp, among others.

Together, the three major pillars constitute the Metagame, and the smaller ones help maintain its balance and sustainability. As the largest pieces, Monstrous Rage, Up the Beanstalk and This Town Ain’t Big Enough live in a kind of rock-paper-scissors with each other, where one preys on the other.

Consequently, removing any of them from Standard without removing the others would cause the format to tip towards one of the pendulums, so it would be necessary to remove all three cards at once and let the format rebuild from there.

The same measure was taken in the last announcement on Pauper. Kuldotha Rebirth and Basking Broodscale were the heart of two of the best decks in the format — one of them with very troublesome play patterns — and their banning forces players to reinvent the Metagame.

First, the archetypes that were not affected will emerge, followed by those that benefit from no longer facing matches against Kuldotha Red and Broodscale Combo. Then, the format will begin to undergo the transformations caused by the change in perspective — cards that were previously unplayable become more relevant, strategies that prey on a deck X or Y that was at the top in the first weeks grow, and so the cycle continues until it creates stability: the best archetypes are put in place and the format develops in its rock-paper-scissors cycle.

Given this transformation that a triple ban (or even double, as Kibler suggests) can cause, the June 30 window does indeed seem the most assertive to think about changes in Standard. It already represents a scenario where players are preparing for the rotation that occurs on August 1st with the release of Edge of Eternities, and giving them space to prepare for the new Standard while exploring the possibilities of the post-bans is a great way to keep the format engaged.

Yes, this comes at the expense of an extra period of inertia in Standard — and let's face it, it's been inert since Duskmourn — and the feeling that the format has stagnated and that we've been facing the same decks for months. And this is being enhanced by another factor.

Magic sets will probably only start considering the three-year rotation starting in 2025, or in 2026. Until then, although changes can be made during playtesting and design considering the extension of the longevity of some cards, most of them already exist in a scope of sets, and the initial results of having this extension of the cycle are notable for some cases.

One example is that Zur, Eternal Schemer and the Overlords cycle were not meant to play together, but they interact with each other and make up one of the best decks in the format.

The result of the three-year rotation is that more efficient decks show up more frequently. The mana is better (three-color lists have nearly no concessions these days), the interaction between cards is amplified, and it becomes harder for new cards to impact the Metagame when there are so many good things competing with them.

A more “average” product like Aetherdrift or a core set expansion like Foundations don’t have much of a chance in these circumstances. Each set needs to either increase the power of its cards to impact the Metagame, or it needs to interact very well with something already existing to achieve the same effect — in both cases, they make Standard feel like a stagnant format if they can’t.

That doesn't mean the three-year rotation was a mistake. Magic is prioritizing a stable Standard, and stability is more important than any social media discourse — that's our problem. We've become more short-sighted as a society, and it's up to us to fix the way we perceive reality and time, instead of expecting the world to always revolve around our demands and complaints on Twitter or Reddit.

Three years means more use of your product, and Magic's latest trend went in a direction of making people enjoy these products as much as possible because they want to captivate an audience that is not yet accustomed to it through Universes Beyond. Three years of being able to play with Final Fantasy cards means a lot for those who are Final Fantasy fans and like Magic.

We cannot, however, rule out that the consequences are quite noticeable. Some archetypes will be less effective because things have been around for longer, and others may not even have room for testing because there are much better strategies, and if we look again at this same fan coming from Universes Beyond, it is not very exciting if his Cloud Strife or Spider-Man deck does nothing in a tournament.

In this case, there is a sensitive divide: Standard suffered a lot with a dozen bans between 2017 and 2025. It also suffered from the number of times that these interventions came without prior announcement. Would the possibility of taking advantage of these specific release windows to reformulate the format when necessary every six months be an option?

Would players be satisfied, or would they say again that playing Standard is throwing their money away, since, in addition to these bans every six months, there would also be around four to six sets in a year that could completely change the format? Would it be okay to play a Standard that is so dynamic due to both bans and power creep to the point that the format changes every 60 days?

As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, it doesn't seem like Standard needs bans for the reasons that tend to provoke interventions in competitive formats. Although there are the best decks and cards that are their backbones, there is diversity in the Metagame and ways to interact with each of them so that none of them are too predominant.

However, the possibility of maintenance interventions, not unlike what happened in Pauper recently, is a good way to keep the format interesting. But it needs to be done at the right timing, and perhaps doing it in the pre-rotation cycle is the best moment.

In this case, banning the three major pillars and seeing how the Metagame develops without them while we wait for Edge of Eternities to arrive is a viable and probably prudent option to shake things up a bit.

But there’s another card that we haven’t discussed much about, but it’s at the heart of red today, should remain so throughout the next season, and could cause just as much trouble as it does today, even without Monstrous Rage:

The Mice package is very efficient. So good that it’s now one of the best Pioneer decks too, as demonstrated by the Arena Championship, and the interaction of Manifold Mouse with Heartfire Hero and Emberheart Challenger is a testament to the potential resilience that the archetype has.

One of the main lines of play for Red Aggro today involves casting Heartfire Hero on turn one, hoping that there isn't a Torch the Tower in the opponent's hand, and going on the attack on turn two with Manifold Mouse. On turn three, Hero becomes a difficult threat to interact with because any removal has the added risk of being answered by a pump. In the end, what would serve to prevent six damage ends up dealing six anyway, and can still bring in another creature if it's a Turn Inside Out.

With Monastery Swiftspear and Cacophony Scamp dropping in the next rotation, Red Aggro's explosive potential will, for now, be mainly focused on Heartfire Hero even though other options exist that should replace Swiftspear, such as Kellan, Planar Trailblazer.

Removing it would make Manifold Mouse lines or a Mice plan much less efficient without certain deckbuilding concessions, and would also remove the one drop that punishes removal the most from red decks today.

One could argue that the problem lies with Manifold and how it provides the complete package for Heartfire Hero and Emberheart Challenger, but I don't think a Mice deck would be viable without its inclusion, and the goal of this potential ban would be to weaken Red-based Aggro, not completely invalidate an archetype that is not remotely competitive today compared to its peers.

That's all for today!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks for reading!