They did it.
Legacy
- Psychic Frog is banned.
- Vexing Bauble is banned.
With the last announcement, we banned Grief to curb the dominance of Dimir Reanimator. We achieved that to some degree but not quite to the extent we were hoping. With Dimir Reanimator sitting at double the play rate of the next most played strategy and maintaining a strong win rate, we believe more action is needed.
Psychic Frog plays extremely well within the general shell of a reanimator strategy, providing a threat that must be answered that is also able to give you value when drawing your expensive reanimation targets. The Dimir Reanimator deck has been able to circumvent anti-graveyard technology by having an extremely efficient, fair game plan. While we believe reanimator to be a healthy archetype for Legacy, it should have its usual weaknesses. Additionally, the power of Psychic Frog narrows the range of reanimator variants, forcing players to consolidate down to a tight Dimir shell.
This same effect is seen in Dimir Murktide decklists. Psychic Frog is strong enough to prevent folks from exploring adding white, red, or green to these blue-based tempo decks. To increase the diversity among existing archetypes while not completely removing them from the format, Psychic Frog is banned.
In addition to discussing Psychic Frog, we also went over some other cards we could ban to reduce the strength of Dimir Reanimator. Specifically, Entomb and Reanimate. It was our belief that removing either would not solve the issue of Dimir Reanimator having a solid, fair game plan, as the deck leans on the threat of Psychic Frog when folks are packing graveyard hate. Also, it is possible that the removal of either Entomb or Reanimate could be too strong a blow to reanimator strategies, removing them from the metagame completely.
One of the pillars of Legacy is free counter magic. It is part of the glue that holds the format together. When certain strategies can ignore this pillar at very little cost to their primary proactive game plan, the format can begin to fall apart quickly. Decks like Mystic Forge Combo, Painter’s Servant Combo, and other red Ancient Tomb decks are happy to include a one-mana artifact that can replace itself when it’s no longer useful.
While the inclusion of Vexing Bauble is a rather recent development in the Legacy metagame, it has proven to be a successful and powerful one. With a concerning win rate among decks that include multiple main-deck copies of Vexing Bauble and its inherent strength against a pillar of the format, it has been banned in Legacy.
With Psychic Frog and Vexing Bauble removed from the format, several of the top decks will need to change. The recent success of Nadu variants, Cephalid Breakfast and Bant Green Sun’s Zenith decks, has us keeping a close eye on Nadu, Winged Wisdom. For now, we believe today’s changes should navigate the format into a more diverse and healthy position.
They took down the 2 out of the 4 cards that I was looking at. They like free spells but got rid of Grief. Doesn’t make any sense but I guess enough people hated the frog so that got the axe. The vexing bauble is another story. Most decks were running 1-2 in the main with the exception of Mystic Forge decks.
With these bans looks like delver is going back to U/R. Reanimator will be weaker, combo will suffer from the vexing bauble ban. We will have to see how the format shakes up. Get your null rods ready.