[Banlist] 11/03/2024 - Modern & Vintage

MODERN

Violent Outburst is banned.

In our previous Modern update, we removed Fury and Up the Beanstalk from the environment. Doing so has returned Rakdos Midrange to an acceptable level without deleting it from the metagame entirely. Since then, we've seen Temur Rhinos, Living End, Golgari Yawgmoth, Amulet Titan, and Izzet Phoenix rise in metagame share. More recently, players have had some success with Leyline of the Guildpact from Murders at Karlov Manor in Domain Zoo and Rhinos variants featuring Scion of Draco and Leyline Binding .

Over the past Regional Championship season, Temur Rhinos has begun to approach previous levels of Rakdos Midrange metagame dominance. While we want to preserve the cascade strategies as viable options in Modern, we'd like to remove one of the more powerful aspects of their strategy. Namely, the ability to cascade into a payoff card at instant speed. Casting Violent Outburst during an opponent's turn reduces a lot of the risk inherent in such a strategy. It allows the cascade player to untap with all their mana open and Rhino tokens or cycling creatures ready to attack. Both decks also include Force of Negation , which costs zero mana on opponents' turns, enabling a streamlined defense of the combo.

Violent Outburst is banned. Removing Violent Outburst from the format will necessitate cascade players to adopt Ardent Plea or Demonic Dread and force them to play on their own turn more often, weakening both cascade strategies and reducing them to an acceptable level of metagame share, much like the Fury ban did to Rakdos Midrange.

VINTAGE

Ponder is unrestricted.

Ponder has been restricted in Vintage since 2008! It's not necessarily true that we want to reintroduce every card that has been restricted for over a decade, but evidence suggests Ponder is ready to come back into the four-of club.

While not much has changed in Vintage since our last announcement, we believe that spell-based combo decks in Vintage could use a little boost. The top of the metagame features decks like Lurrus Saga, Initiative, and Mishra's Workshop shells. Even if many of the Lurrus decks contain blue, they generally feature zero copies of Ponder .

While this shouldn't cause a huge shift, it should give a few percentage points back to decks looking to find specific cards to enact their strategy more consistently.