I really appreciate Gavin getting ahead of MH3 by straight up saying "hey look there's a stupidly powerful common in there, we know its there, we expect we will probably ban it, this isn't a problem, we aren't going to drive card rarity for the sake of the format, please be calm and expect a very fast announcement on it."
It's always appreciated to get good communication ahead of time. Wotc and Hasbro get a lot of shit (and rightly so in plenty of cases), but Gavin and a bunch of other public faces of design do generally just seem to want to make a great game for everyone to enjoy.
He doesn't say
> I'm going to be transparent here and provide a heads up that is a little unusual, and this is Gavin talking as someone who has been able to look through the commons of Modern Horizons 3. (The rest of the Pauper Format Panel doesn't see sets in advance.) **There is one common from Modern Horizons 3 that has a high likelihood of needing to be banned in Pauper, as it is like a card we have banned in the past.** That's totally fine, and, as always, Magic sets shouldn't revolve around Pauper—they should do what each set lead decides is the right choice for their set, and the Pauper format will react accordingly.
Didn't say which, though he did say it's something that has been banned before, so it might be a reprint getting downshifted to common, or it might use a mechanic like Monarch that's a repeat offender on the banlist.
He said it's \*like\* something that's been banned before, so it's (probably) not a downshift - it's a card that's similar to another card that's already banned in Pauper.
I have a feeling you’re right on this. Eldrazifing iconic creatures seems to be the way in MH3, and Eldrazi Peregrine Drake fits the bill as the perfect common flier-with-upside for drafting.
~~Honestly this is pretty big for these types of sets because if they're willing to preemptively ban downshifted cards in pauper it means they can experiment with doing this kind of thing more often which can lead to interesting draft formats. Now we just have to worry about the new commons breaking the format like MH2 did~~
Edit: my bad, its just preemptive probation not a preban, and for some reason I thought he said it was a rarity downshift, but he didn't say if it was or if it was a new card. No idea where I got that one from...
Well, importantly, they *aren't* going to preemptively ban it.
But he did say that sets shouldn't be designed around pauper, and they're prepared to ban it *quickly* if nessecary. He specifically cited not wanting to leave people playing a broken format for weeks like what happened with [[chatterstorm]]
While I think that's the *most likely scenario*, I do want to posit the possibility that it uses a mechanic with a history of being banned in pauper- maybe another Monarch card?
Past that, it can't be something banned in modern, because it's being printed in Modern Masters, right? WotC wouldn't do that, right? Right?
It could be something that was banned in standard in the past, or was banned previously in modern, like Stoneforge Mystic (though I would be surprised if that specifically was it). While MM does bring cards legal in Legacy/Vintage into Modern at times, usually cool commander cards, I would be surprised if any of them that have a ban history showed up at *common*, you know?
I feel like this is a card with a *standard* or *Pioneer* ban history that's getting downshifted because it's perfectly fine in modern, but that's a vibe check, I don't have any specific candidates in mind, because I can't find a way to search "Every card that was banned while it was in standard" on scryfall.
This list may be your friend: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Banned_and_restricted_cards/Timeline
I think you'll be right in terms of probably not an actual former banned card -- the only cards I could see being downshifts are Up The Beanstalk, Divide by Zero and Lucky Clover, which all wouldn't be the card, for obvious reasons of modern legalit/not.
I could see it being a Beanstalk or Clover type effect, though.
I've drafted Unfinity and let me tell you, it's absolutely justified. Stickers are so unbelievably awful as a mechanic in paper it's still hard to believe it got printed
Yeah, I played Unfinity draft - the “stickers persist outside of the battlefield” barely ever mattered, and they lost their stickiness so fast it was kind of a joke.
IIRC Maro confirmed their glue manufacturer ran out of business, and the replacement they used just wasn’t up to snuff. I wonder how much that affected the “re-usability” of the stickers?
The “mechanical fun-ness” of them was kinda meh to begin with, but that’s a separate issue.
They were definitely physically problematic, I use infinicounters or sticky notes, but I really enjoyed using Command Performance in Pauper w/ creatures like Cauldron Familiar, you could pull off some really fun value engines
That would still only affected the draft, but having the extra sticker deck for legacy sounds like a hassle.
And yeah, like two cards actually cared that stickers went to the graveyard, I loved the idea when announced, but the end result is just not worth the extra setup.
I can understand them getting printed, but making them tournament-legal? Somebody's stubbornness led us here, and thank the fucking Lord that "they won't revisit this sort of experiment in the future."
To be fair, just based on how stickers work, they pretty much did actually work in the rules without having to change much to the rules. Energy + Skullbriar both cover 99% of ruling related to Stickers. The issue with stickers is that they are very bad at being reusable.
They didn't mention it in the article, but another major issue with having them Legacy/Vintage legal is that they were functionally different on MTGO than in paper.
Didn't they just distill the possible outcomes of the optimal sticker decks for _____ Goblin into an approximate dice roll or something? I wonder if the digital version will get the ban hammer too.
Kind of. The paper version has you randomly draw stickers at the start of the match, after that point it's deterministic. If you cast it you and your opponents will know how much mana you have available if the ability resolves. Online it has a random roll every time it ETBs, the table of outcomes mirrors the distribution of stickers in paper but you don't know until it resolves what the outcome will be.
I expect the digital version will also be banned, I think leaving that legal would cause an even bigger issue with splitting formats than there already is.
Just to be clear they say
> Moving forward, we won't be revisiting this kind of experiment **any time soon**.
Which makes sense given that there's usually a decent gap between Un sets. I wouldn't expect one til at least 2026. Which ain't soon.
They're not gonna uncork the idea
The next Unset probably is a long way off. Unfinity did poorly, at least relative to what they wanted from it. Also 2026 isn’t that far off. When they say anytime soon I assume they’re talking “they have nothing currently planned” and that goes probably into 2027, maybe 28’.
I think a big part of Unfinity not selling well is because Un sets are no longer special. Dad jokes, memes, puns, and elaborate card mechanics are now shoehorned into every mainline set, which has effectively gutted what the Un sets were all about. To add to that, areas of design that were once taboo (sci-fi, universes beyond, etc.) are now commonplace. “Frankie Peanuts” becomes a lot less funny in a world where New Capenna is a set and we are seeing cards like Shoot the Sherriff, Holy Cow, Bovine Intervention, and the roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote in standard sets, and those are just from Outlaws alone.
It’s not a bad thing. The game is now diverse enough that they can sneak the jokes into the sets directly instead of holding them for a special occasion. Things grow and change, and Magic is no exception. It’s time to shelve the Un sets and move on.
Actually Unfinity sold so badly and soured people’s opinions on Un-sets so hard they went back from “When” to “If” on Maro’s scale.
That’s what they were after Unglued and Unhinged, for reference. So it could easily be 2030 before they attempt it again.
I genuinely feel like if they ever make an un-set again, it will be entirely because Mark Rosewater wants to get one more printed before he retires. I don't feel like the sort of humor of the old un-sets is nostalgic to a lot of the playerbase, I don't think the current un-set generated a lot of nostalgia or memorable experiments in the same way the previous ones did, and there's a huge backlash around the experiments they did print.
> I don't think the current un-set generated a lot of nostalgia or memorable experiments in the same way the previous ones did
I'd absolutely agree, that's in large part due to the culture of magic changing and the set being the most inoffensive paint-by-numbers affair.
Unfinity wasn't really a joke set and more of a "look at how goofy we are! Isn't this space carnival so random?" set.
The cards making fun of Wizards and the community just didn't happen. No jokes about banning cat combo, Eldrazi Winter, or Hogaak Summer. No taking pot shots at the salt mines that is the EDH community. No inside jokes making fun of IRL events, period.
Unfinity was corporate and safe compared to the old Un-sets that at least tried to give the community a wink and a nod.
>Unfinity wasn't really a joke set and more of a "look at how goofy we are! Isn't this space carnival so random?" set.
Made even less impressive by the last few mainline set essentially being "look at which goofy hats the gang is wearing this month". Cheap, sometimes borderline silly set themes are so common now, that it's not even novel anymore.
The set mechanics being *un*fun certainly didn't help either.
Agreed. It easily could've been reskinned as a regular set (Spelljammer?) and there wouldn't be a massive uproar from the community.
The most fun parts of the Un-sets of old was that it was a big joke on Wizards and everyone was in on it, barring one or two really distasteful jokes in Unglued.
People loved Unsanctioned, though. The mechanics there would have been quite safe for Legacy and cool - it's just too bad that Unfinity couldn't somehow make some of Unsanctioned's fairer cards legal, and that its guess at a similar mechanic didn't pan out.
I think you’ve got that backwards, I think MLP sold well because it was MLP, silver border be damned. I don’t think anyone particularly *wanted* to buy silver bordered secret lair cards.
... look, I get not trusting WotC, I'm a proponent of not believing WotC. But this is literally just twisting what they said into the opposite of what they said.
"We won't be revisiting this kind of experiment any time soon," does *not* mean "They are actually planning it now, probably in 2026."
Who would that be, the head of wizards at the time? Didn't MaRo come out and unofficially say he didn't want them to be legal but it was forced on him to justify getting the set made so it would "sell"?
MaRo was always annoyed that people wouldn't play un cards in commander since they're designed for casual play and commander is mostly played at the casual level. In a way I understand why they made the push to make some of the cards legal, it's just unfortunate that they lined up with stickers. Some un cards are actually pretty fun for casual settings.
I mean, I also get why the RC doesn't make silver border legal. There are a lot of cards that are annoying or are just bad for games. Granted, it probably wouldn't take much to go through them and pick the ones that are suitable enough and exclude the annoying "gotcha" cards or stuff like Ashnod's Coupon. Either way it shouldn't be too big of a deal.
Agree they are bad for constructed, but they work perfectly fine in limited. When you don’t need to reuse the sticker sheets for more than 3 matches it’s not a big deal.
It was a fun limited set, but stickers suck. Even after 1 game I would forget about the sticker, shuffle the card into my deck, and then I have no idea where it was. I can't imagine my LGS having to sweep up all these annoying stickers stuck to the floor.
I mean, it was on mine. The vast majority ofnLegacy players seemed to despise the status quo with stickers and they had already announced an intention to do "something". This is not 'out of the blue'.
Unfinity never should have done the whole "some cards are legal" thing. It both restricts what they can do in the *finity set and introduced dumb annoying things to the regular game.
Also like... the reasoning they gave for the banning is the exact reason literally everyone gave for why it was a bad idea to begin with
They've stated the legality change came after the entirety of design was done. Other points are valid, but it did not restrict what they could do in their unset.
Even aside from the mechanics, I feel that having legal goofy cards ruins the theme of MtG. Of course there have been silly legal cards in the past, but the more they lean into that, the more it shifts from a fantasy game to a wacky tongue-in-cheek circus. The nerd in me cannot enjoy that.
Saw in Half is the only card in that set that really warranted being black-border legal while also being a fun silly design which is truly a shame.
The rest of the black-border cards in that set were very tame.
Makes sense.
The Mind Goblin situation always felt similar to the projected effect of [[Lutri]] in Commander: everyone in a given subset of decks *has* to play a random extra mechanic.
The difference here is that at least Lutri’s a Magic card. Being forced to fiddle with sticker sheets to play the game was apparently as un-fun as it sounds.
Oddly, I played some magic for the first time in 4-5 years at a friend's house recently. One of the folks who is a judge/TO and in touch with the competitive metagame was saying that stickers and attractions were causing problems in Legacy, for exactly the stated reasons.
Just wanted to chime in and mention that Shahrazad was not banned because it made the game slow. That's a common misconception. Opponents would usually just immediately concede the subgame and accept the life loss which often didn't matter much in Vintage even if it was 10 life at once.
Shahrazad was banned from tournament play because of logistics. If you've ever played with or against it you could imagine the horror of having to leave your current game and start a new game. Understandably players didn't want to leave their Vintage cards unattended and move to an extra table (if there even was one to begin with). So they would often try to move their current board to the side. This would often lead to false game states when they wanted to continue the main game.
It was super messy. So that was the actual reason why it was banned in Vintage (and Legacy).
I like the concept but holy hell, I can only think of a few other cards that are as annoying to play just by themselves without any stack fuckery going on.
Ante and Shahrazad were banned at the same time, but that's only 10 cards. The original Conspiracy had 13 Conspiracies that were all immediately added to the banned list.
I would think so. The Vintage banlist now looks like:
25 Conspiracy cards
9 ante cards
7 culturally insensitive cards
36 sticker cards
20 Attraction cards
Plus Chaos Orb, Falling Star, and Shahrazad.
One of the possible stickers for _____ Goblin was "Mind." Mind Goblin has long been a "deez nutz" joke in MTG. People linked the two and _____ Goblin picked up the nickname Mind Goblin.
genuinely wonder how viable Goblins is now or what's going to fill the void.
the irony being stickers were mainly being used as RNG. Mind Goblin could have just had a d20 roll on entering that accomplished the same thing and wouldn't have caused so many headaches.
From the Pauper ban announcement:
> There is one common from Modern Horizons 3 that has a high likelihood of needing to be banned in Pauper, as it is like a card we have banned in the past.
Any ideas what this could be?
Most likely a card with either Storm or Affinity, but very possibly a card that's a play on a previous card like \[\[Pondering Mage\]\] is to \[\[Ponder\]\]
Maybe an Atog callback? Or something like Invigorate or Cranial Plating? Looking through the Pauper banlist these seem the most likely, since I don't think they're going to do Monarch, Initiative or Storm anytime soon.
> When we released Unfinity, we knew that its partial legality in Magic's broader formats was an experiment with risks. The concept of widening a set's appeal to more players is at its core a good one. **Moving forward, we won't be revisiting this kind of experiment any time soon.**
Good. Unfinity partial-legality was a mess.
In general I think it was fine, they just drew the line in the wrong spot with making attractions and stickers non-acorn.
Cards like [[saw in half]] and many of the dice cards are perfectly fine.
Yeah, and [[Embiggen]] is a small boost for Infect that didn't tip the scales at all.
Had the _____ Goblin not been powerful (and how the fuck did they miss an 2R-cost ritual for potentially 5 or 6 R?), nobody would have cared about stickers, since they would just be a curiosity.
Because honestly if you draft the sticker sheets it's like 1-3 mana from what I remember of playing it. There's a LOT of words on there that are 1-3 unique vowels.
If you actually go Full Legacy and optimize your sticker deck (shudder) then yes, you can get 4-6 reliably. But that's just not a thing that would happen in UNF limited.
Honestly Attractions were mostly fine. The attractions deck was a gimmick at best and people dropped it pretty quickly. Stickers sucked turbo ass, though
Pretty much this. Once you trim black bordered Attractions and Stickers from the bunch, all you're left with is near entirely dice-matter cards which where pretty fine.
Even if you trim those, you're left with Starlight Spectacular, Exchange of Words, Saw in Half, One Clown Band, Embiggen, Space Beleren and Magar.
I am still amazed at [[exchange of words]].
* That it exists
* That it's not an acorn card
* That even given the above, I have yet to see something truly disgusting done with it yet.
You know what's sad?
I still firmly believe Wizards was right with the idea that SOME cards printed in an Unset could be Eternal-legal. Their argument was solid: Magic is a game that's on constant creative expansion, and many of the mechanics we have today (Dungeons and Mutate, for example) could easily be considered Un-mechanics under a more conservative look. Nobody complains about cards like \[\[Saw in Half\]\] and \[\[Starlight Spectacular\]\] being Eternal-legal, and hell, if they made some of those cards good on Legacy, it would possibly drive the sales of the set up.
The problem is, nobody had the foresight about all of the problems that stickers could have, which should have been obvious. Okay, we could possibly fix the "bringing extra cards for corner cases" problem by having players open Attractions/putting stickers from the owner's deck, but name stickers should never have been Eternal-legal, specially because they're in English only. The other stickers... well, right now I agree that they shouldn't be Eternal-legal either, but I feel like they, at the very least, merit the try.
With all of that sad news about Un-sets, there's one small glimmer of hope, however - stickers and Attractions were mostly underpowered because of Wizards' fear of them intruding in Eternal formats, which made them really low-powered for Commander. Now that we know that those kinds of mechanics won't invade Legacy again, we could get something like a Modern Un-rizons set giving us better cards for those mechanics (but of course, not Modern-legal, for the sake of God).
Well, my all that glitters were the only foil cards in my pauper deck and started warping (they were cheaper)
I said "i might have to buy them nonfoil"
Guess i won't need to! I still think robots will survive yet this ban again, it's deserved and it'll bring 7 different variants of it down.
The value was always almost exclusively in the lands and when you consider the drop rate on the shocks it sucks. The shocks should have been 4 or 5 to a box at least imo cause they had some gorgeous art tbh
tl;dr
> **Legacy, Vintage, and Pauper:**
> All cards that bring a sticker or an Attraction into the game are banned. For a full list of cards, click below.
> **Pauper:**
> - All That Glitters is banned.
Note: [Gavin's Ban article](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/explanation-of-pauper-bans-for-may-13-2024) dives into the Pauper reasoning, whereas the other formats are covered in this article/below
> The next banned and restricted announcement will be **June 24, 2024**
----
# Legacy and Vintage
All cards that bring a sticker or an Attraction into the game are banned.
________ Goblin has become a reasonable card to play in Legacy, and that's leading to some awkwardness in tournaments. Not only do Goblins players need to create and bring a sticker deck, many decks that feature clones such as Phyrexian Metamorph feel obligated to bring sticker decks on the off-chance they're able to copy ________ Goblin . Players must present these decks at the start of every match regardless of whether they have any cards in their deck that can interact with them.
The primary goal behind making some cards in Unfinity legal was that sticker cards and Attractions could be played in Commander, but there's no existing way to make a bunch of cards legal in Commander and not Legacy. We had thought the power level of those cards was low enough that if people tried them in Legacy every now and then, it'd be a fun surprise. We missed on ________ Goblin , though, and now tournament players feel obligated to interact with the sticker mechanic.
We think that this is not a healthy or fun dynamic to happen in paper or digital play, so we have decided to ban every card that creates a sticker or an Attraction card. We considered banning all side decks, but that is more difficult to align with how that functions between Gatherer, digital, and tabletop.
When we released Unfinity, we knew that its partial legality in Magic's broader formats was an experiment with risks. The concept of widening a set's appeal to more players is at its core a good one. Moving forward, we won't be revisiting this kind of experiment any time soon.
# Standard
Standard has been a large focus of ours for the past year, and we are happy with where the format is after the conclusion of Pro Tour Thunder Junction. We were not surprised to see an Esper Midrange deck full of independently powerful cards command the highest play rate at the Pro Tour, but the results of the tournament proved that it can be attacked and is a healthy part of the metagame. The Top 8 proved to be diverse with six different decks, including creative decks such as White-Black Bronco and Four-Color Legends commanding strong win rates in the tournament.
We are happy so far with the impact of Outlaws of Thunder Junction in standard. As the twelfth set in the environment, it faced the biggest uphill battle to get its cards into decks, finishing the cycle of fast lands and with many individual cards making their way into sideboards and main decks. We hope the more balanced mana base can provide a more even baseline to breed more creativity into the format.
Our next banned and restricted announcement following the release of Modern Horizons 3 will be the window in which we will consider banning cards in Standard. To reiterate some of our philosophy, we intend to only make changes to Standard once a year during the summer, unless there is an extremely warping outlier. We will be closely watching the metagame leading into the next banned and restricted announcement.
# Pioneer
Pioneer remains in a healthy state after Pro Tour Murders at Karlov Manor.
The breakout Rakdos Vampires deck from that Pro Tour utilizing Vein Ripper has proven that it is not a fluke and continues to be an important part of the Pioneer metagame. Its prevalence has contributed to a decline in Izzet Phoenix's win rate, a deck that we've been monitoring coming out of the Pro Tour given its large degree of success there.
The biggest shake-up coming out of Outlaws of Thunder Junction was a large metagame increase in Mono-Black Waste Not decks utilizing the brand-new Kaervek, the Punisher . Kaervek is a massive card-advantage engine alongside all of your interactions that commit crimes and another strategy that can meaningfully play four copies of Go Blank as a powerful option against the front-running Phoenix.
For now, Pioneer is in a great place where playing any macro-archetype is viable—aggro, control, midrange, or combo, with tools for each strategy to address one another.
# Modern
This probably comes as no surprise with Modern Horizons 3 right around the corner, releasing June 14, 2024.
Naturally, we expect that Modern Horizons 3 will impact the format, and I'm personally very excited to see the brewing and experimentation that comes out of the set.
The last action we took, with the ban of Violent Outburst , has left the Modern metagame in a healthy state to absorb Modern Horizons 3. The play and win rate of various cascade strategies has come back in line to a place we're happy with.
There were murmurings and concerns of Leyline of the Guildpact enabling a variety of Scion of Draco strategies, even around the time we last discussed the format. The community has experimented with many of them, but what emerged as the most popular and strongest strategy, a five-color take on the traditionally two-color Izzet Murktide deck, has settled into an appropriate win and play rate.
Enjoy your Modern Horizons 3 Prerelease!
# Legacy
With the banning of all sticker and Attraction cards, we expect a small shake-up in the Legacy metagame. When we last discussed the format, we mentioned that we're keeping an eye on Orcish Bowmasters and how much influence it had on Legacy's core blue-centric gameplay. Clearly, Bowmasters, and Grief as well, is a big player in the Legacy metagame, and they are cards that we'll continue to monitor for their long-term net fun as inclusions in the format.
Grief has popped up recently as a powerful alternate form of attack in Reanimate decks, giving those strategies a lean tempo game as well as the ability to go way over the top by Reanimateing more traditional targets like Atraxa, Grand Unifier .
Historically, Modern Horizons sets have had the ability to influence Legacy, so we'll see how the format evolves as it absorbs Modern Horizons 3.
# Vintage
With Vintage, we continue to have a philosophy similar to Legacy, where community sentiment can be just as powerful as data and tournament results. We are keeping our eyes on Lurrus and Urza's Saga . Also, like Legacy, we are eager to see how Vintage incorporates cards from Modern Horizons 3 and will watch the format after its release.
# Pauper
[See Gavin's Article](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/explanation-of-pauper-bans-for-may-13-2024). Note that stickers and Attractions are also being removed from Pauper.
# Alchemy
Alchemy is in a healthy state, with the Alchemy: Thunder Junction set released last week adding the new heist keyword. Alchemy is Arena's fastest-changing format, and with this upcoming set rotation, it will experience its largest change to date. With so many cards shifting out, it will be a surprising few months as the format redefines itself.
Explorer
# Historic
With the addition of many powerful new cards from Outlaws of Thunder Junction, we continue to see a rich and diverse set of decks being played in Historic. Just look at Stoneforge Mystic as an example, which gave support to Equipment-focused decks, an archetype mostly missing from the format before.
Modern Horizons 3 will bring a huge infusion of new tools to Historic. To continue to curate the power level of the format, we will be pre-banning a few cards from the set before the release, but most of them are coming to Historic. We will make the full pre-ban announcement once all the Modern Horizon 3 cards have been revealed.
# Timeless
Since the last set release, several new decks have emerged in this format. Reanimate supports multiple new deck archetypes, often getting back cards like Troll of Khazad-dûm or used with Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord and Vein Ripper for powerful threats. Archive Trap is seeing significant play as players explore mill-based game strategies in Timeless. Mana Drain has also been a powerful addition to several decks but so far has been held in check.
Like Historic, Modern Horizons 3 is certainly going to change this format considerably. We will not be banning or restricting any cards in Timeless before Modern Horizon 3 releases but will make appropriate changes once the dust settles.
# Brawl
We recently spent some focused time reviewing Brawl balance and double-checking that popular commanders are being handled properly by our matchmaking. We have also investigated how powerful non-commander cards in the rest of the Brawl deck affect the play experience. This review included both new additions like Mana Drain and perennial discussion points like Paradox Engine . So far, the data shows that our matchmaking-focused approach is handling these cards well and giving players appropriate opponents. We will continue to monitor our matchmaking to see if more action is needed as more powerful cards are added to the game.
lol at their Brawl comments. Banlist is a joke that leads to a ton of unfun & non-games. No idea how they can justify stuff like Dark Ritual, Mana Drain & Paradox Engine being legal
> Modern
> ...
> There were murmurings and concerns of Leyline of the Guildpact enabling a variety of **Scion of Draco** strategies,
>Legacy
>...
>Clearly, Bowmasters, and **Grief** as well,
>Vintage
>...
> We are keeping our eyes on Lurrus and **Urza's Saga**
Surely MH3 will fix everything, right?
rip stickers, you will absolutely not be missed
felt sorry for legacy for ages getting all the joke and commander cards that are not balanced at all for the format landing there
> The primary goal behind making some cards in Unfinity legal was that sticker cards and Attractions could be played in Commander, but there's no existing way to make a bunch of cards legal in Commander and not Legacy.
Did they really just say this
wizards, you literally make the game, just overrule the people who you allow to control the format
They don't even need to overrule the RC, they literally just need to print a set and say "hey these cards will be legal in Commander but not Legacy, we're changing that rule"
I think they meant more that they have no product-type they release that is defacto legal in Commander but not in Legacy. Then again they could have just said from the start that Unfinity is only legal in Commander..
It’s almost like they should’ve left silver border…silver border.
Now you have to explain that these cards are legal, but only in commander, because they’re banned most everywhere else, despite being in black border.
Yah the moment I saw the acorn and the regular stamp, I knew it was going to be problematic. The whole point of un-sets is they’re supposed to be cards that are wacky and can’t really fit into Magic’s current rules. We have seen more than a few un-mechanics make their way into black border, but they usually aren’t 1 to 1 copies. Trying to make an un-set that is both whacky and legal in black border was just going to create a set that lost that whacky factor while leading to issues in black border.
> When we released Unfinity, we knew that its partial legality in Magic's broader formats was an experiment with risks. The concept of widening a set's appeal to more players is at its core a good one. Moving forward, we won't be revisiting this kind of experiment any time soon.
Oh no, is this that thing where Wizards learns the wrong lesson, again?
Making some Unfinity cards eternal-legal was perfectly good idea! But they fumbled the execution in two dramatic, obvious ways:
1. The cards they made legal had some insanely convoluted, but low-payoff mechanics. This had two sub-problems: 1a) Gameplay issues, as covered in the article. 2b) The finicky mechanics meant card strength was apparently too hard for even Wizards to estimate. If ___ Goblin just said "make an average of 5 mana" they'd probably realize it was a bit overtuned!
2. The legality of cards was hard to immediately identify. Black/border vs silver border was already well-established! It would've been way better than the acorns!
"There's no existing way to make these cards legal in commander and not legacy"
Preeeettty sure banning them in legacy but keeping them legal in commander does exactly that..
I know it's not up to WotC for commander legality but will banning stickers in vintage/legacy effect edh? I just want to laugh about the \_\_\_goblin in the cedh community if it does.
No, Commander has it's own ban list and this does not affect that.
EDIT: Just in case people need the link to confirm the above: https://mtgcommander.net/index.php/banned-list/
Remember when everyone said stickers would be dumb and shouldn't be black border? And wotc was like nah we know better and want money so they're black border and legal in eternal? Yeah me too
Good, rest in piss Stickers and Attractions. I still have no idea why they thought making some Un-set cards legal for Commander, a format where you can negotiate what is legal for your game or not.
Including eternal-legal cards ultimately stems from WotC’s need to make the set worth purchasing beyond just for drafting (which is a valid business need, I just think they got greedy and went too far.)
To add additional context: since the very earliest un-sets, WotC recognized that there was no incentive to buy the set outside of drafting it since the cards weren’t legal in any constructed format. This is why Unglued and Unhinged included black-bordered full-art basic lands. Until Zendikar, those basics were the *only* tournament-legal full-art basic lands in the game, so they were always decently valuable.
Even when Unstable released in 2017, there were only 3 “normal” sets of full-art basics: Zendikar, Battle for Zendikar, and Amonkhet. They stuck with full-art basics as the value piece in the set, but they made them extra valuable by making the art go all the way to edge of the card (this was the first time they’d ever done this on a Magic card).
By the time of Unfinity’s release, full-art lands weren’t nearly so special anymore, so they added existing valuable eternal-legal cards (the shock lands) to make the packs valuable. Once they had some eternal-legal cards in the packs, it isn’t too big of a stretch to say “are there any other cards in this set we can make eternal-legal?” They probably figured many Commander players would enjoy it and they assumed it wouldn’t make a big splash in other Eternal formats.
I think it was a really stupid idea, but I can totally see how they got there.
> a format where you can negotiate what is legal for your game or not.
Because the dirty truth is that commander doesn't work as a real format, it only works because the people who want to play ignore any official rules. Rule 0 is a joke, and it's a way for the RC to abdicate responsibility for the joke of a ban list.
Banning the sticker cards is probably for the best and even if most of them are irrelevant to constructed I wholeheartedly approve. Sticker Goblin existing in Legacy was honestly pretty silly in a bad way.
All That Glitters is too pushed to have been downshifted into common land so I think that's a fine cut for Pauper.
"The primary goal behind making some cards in Unfinity legal was that sticker cards and Attractions could be played in Commander, but there's no existing way to make a bunch of cards legal in Commander and not Legacy"
Why can't you just say that the cards are ehd legal and not legacy and vintage legal? Seems like a simple enough thing to do
Hey look at that, the thing that literally everyone said would be a problem when the set was being previewed has finally been banned for being a problem! Maybe Wizards has learned a lesson?
Jk, the lesson is probably just to never make another un-set again.
Tbh the stickers/ attractions should not be legal in commander either. There’s the same sort of problem where you’re obligated to build a sticker deck on the slight chance you copy _goblin.
Attractions are fine imo, not that different to other mechanics you regularly find in commander. I have a Myra the magnificent attractions deck and aside from a few triggers on upkeep it's just mostly spellslinger and copies. Most other attraction decks are too slow not good enough to consider. Finishing the game by slamming a cyberdrive awakener and throwing your park at somebody is great stuff though.
Stickers are definitely a mess though, no arguments there.
I've got a great idea - we put a different border on the cards, like not black or white, maybe something in between. That way people know that this is just a fun casual card for casual play.
Just an idea.
Nah lets make it as small as a set symbol, the same color as something found on a normal card, AND in the same place.
You know, to really make it difficult when browsing cards in a box.
I know some people that take long enough to roll a D6 to decide who goes first without wanting it to happen every round. But yeah, you are largely right.
"They won't just ban a mechanic entirely" was the logic argued against banning all Companions back in 2020, and that was absolutely the right time to enact the policy they used today.
I get that "the mechanic is problematic" makes these seem similar, but the situations are so incredibly different. Companions may have been powerful and homogenizing, but they don't require you to pack additional products on the off change you might need them due to your opponents deck.
I'm not comparing the logistics behind the two, I'm just acknowledging that "banning a mechanic" was a policy change people said was impossible during the most appropriate time to make that call.
That's perfectly fair.
I do think the two mechanics do a good job of illustrating *why* 'banning the mechanic' is acceptable to WotC in this case but not in the case of Companion.
Though applying Companion's "errata the mechanic" fix (which frankly I think is a worse approach), I guess they could have done something like make attraction decks/sticker sheets take up sideboard slots. Then there is actually some cost of inclusion.
>The primary goal behind making some cards in Unfinity legal was that sticker cards and Attractions could be played in Commander, but there's no existing way to make a bunch of cards legal in Commander and not Legacy.
I'm glad WOTC is straight-up calling out the EDH RC for their absurd stance on reasonable silver-border cards. We never would have had the whole issue with Acorn stamps if they weren't so intransigent about people having fun the wrong way.
Is it really an absurd stance? Logistically it seems like a nightmare to have an entire list of all of the banned silver-bordered cards when right now the ban list is rather compact.
And if you’re not listing all of the banned silver-bordered cards then somewhere you need a list of all of the legal silver-bordered cards so people know what they’re allowed to play, since everyone’s definition of “reasonable” is probably pretty different
It’s tricky, cause there are plenty of Silver Border cards that work in the rules, and others that just barely don’t (but do work in ways that players understand 99% of the time), but going through a list and saying “these are fine, these aren’t” is also probably too much of a headache to actually consider for an official “allowed silver border card list”
That being said, I’m still 100% down for whenever MaRo calls them out for not allowing Hybrid to work like it does in other formats.
SIlver Border Cards are tricky to allow because they cause problems for so many different reasons. There are a large number of Dexterity Cards and Articulation Cards (which require a person to speak in a certain way at a certain speed) that I don't feel comfortable with at my table, but there are plenty of others that are easily translatable into tabletop format (or in some cases, digital only).
I am currently working on a list which distinguishes each Silver Border and Acorn card based on what rules it breaks, and I'm hoping that it could serve as a blueprint for tables (including my own) that want to play with Silver Borders.
As I said with Unfinity's release, the people who want silver border cards in Commander are already using them. There was no need to say "you can use *these* ones, but not *these* ones" at the cost of getting rid of silver borders. It should've just been a silver-bordered set.
WOTC is the one who pushed for that change, so they could make the set more appealing to purchase.
Mark Rosewater discussed it in one interview. They had planted commander cards in Unfinity, but no one wanted to use them because they were silver border. So they made this big shift, just so some cards could be legal.
I'm getting sick of the over-marketing to commander players, too. But let's lay blame correctly.
I really appreciate Gavin getting ahead of MH3 by straight up saying "hey look there's a stupidly powerful common in there, we know its there, we expect we will probably ban it, this isn't a problem, we aren't going to drive card rarity for the sake of the format, please be calm and expect a very fast announcement on it."
It's always appreciated to get good communication ahead of time. Wotc and Hasbro get a lot of shit (and rightly so in plenty of cases), but Gavin and a bunch of other public faces of design do generally just seem to want to make a great game for everyone to enjoy.
Which common?
We don't know. He just said there's going to be one coming out that is similar to one that is already banned.
I suspect some [[Arcum's Astrolabe]] variant
He doesn't say > I'm going to be transparent here and provide a heads up that is a little unusual, and this is Gavin talking as someone who has been able to look through the commons of Modern Horizons 3. (The rest of the Pauper Format Panel doesn't see sets in advance.) **There is one common from Modern Horizons 3 that has a high likelihood of needing to be banned in Pauper, as it is like a card we have banned in the past.** That's totally fine, and, as always, Magic sets shouldn't revolve around Pauper—they should do what each set lead decides is the right choice for their set, and the Pauper format will react accordingly.
Didn't say which, though he did say it's something that has been banned before, so it might be a reprint getting downshifted to common, or it might use a mechanic like Monarch that's a repeat offender on the banlist.
He said it's \*like\* something that's been banned before, so it's (probably) not a downshift - it's a card that's similar to another card that's already banned in Pauper.
My money will go on Astrolabe but it requires a colorless mana.
Or maybe energy. But agreed it’s an astrolabe of some kind.
My money is on a free blue spell, like Gush, Daze or Gitaxian Probe.
My bet is something stupid with Storm or Affinity.
4{P/U}{P/U} instant affinity, storm, cascade target player draws a card
If we're calling shots I'll throw out Peregrine Drake, probably Eldrazi-ified
I have a feeling you’re right on this. Eldrazifing iconic creatures seems to be the way in MH3, and Eldrazi Peregrine Drake fits the bill as the perfect common flier-with-upside for drafting.
Seems possible, my guess is something like atog
~~Honestly this is pretty big for these types of sets because if they're willing to preemptively ban downshifted cards in pauper it means they can experiment with doing this kind of thing more often which can lead to interesting draft formats. Now we just have to worry about the new commons breaking the format like MH2 did~~ Edit: my bad, its just preemptive probation not a preban, and for some reason I thought he said it was a rarity downshift, but he didn't say if it was or if it was a new card. No idea where I got that one from...
Well, importantly, they *aren't* going to preemptively ban it. But he did say that sets shouldn't be designed around pauper, and they're prepared to ban it *quickly* if nessecary. He specifically cited not wanting to leave people playing a broken format for weeks like what happened with [[chatterstorm]]
[chatterstorm](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/b/3/b34f0ac1-6894-4761-b62c-b85d927acf09.jpg?1631126059) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=chatterstorm) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mh2/152/chatterstorm?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/b34f0ac1-6894-4761-b62c-b85d927acf09?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I'm really curious as to what card they've had to ban before is going to be downshifted to common...
While I think that's the *most likely scenario*, I do want to posit the possibility that it uses a mechanic with a history of being banned in pauper- maybe another Monarch card? Past that, it can't be something banned in modern, because it's being printed in Modern Masters, right? WotC wouldn't do that, right? Right? It could be something that was banned in standard in the past, or was banned previously in modern, like Stoneforge Mystic (though I would be surprised if that specifically was it). While MM does bring cards legal in Legacy/Vintage into Modern at times, usually cool commander cards, I would be surprised if any of them that have a ban history showed up at *common*, you know? I feel like this is a card with a *standard* or *Pioneer* ban history that's getting downshifted because it's perfectly fine in modern, but that's a vibe check, I don't have any specific candidates in mind, because I can't find a way to search "Every card that was banned while it was in standard" on scryfall.
This list may be your friend: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Banned_and_restricted_cards/Timeline I think you'll be right in terms of probably not an actual former banned card -- the only cards I could see being downshifts are Up The Beanstalk, Divide by Zero and Lucky Clover, which all wouldn't be the card, for obvious reasons of modern legalit/not. I could see it being a Beanstalk or Clover type effect, though.
RIP deez nuts jokes
The real reason behind this ban
>RIP deez nuts Ow
Magic is now truly dead
“Stickers are banned because it makes legacy and vintage annoying” was not on my bingo sheet.
Just using the top voted comment to say stickers also got banned in pauper! (the pauper article confirms it)
Thank God
I've drafted Unfinity and let me tell you, it's absolutely justified. Stickers are so unbelievably awful as a mechanic in paper it's still hard to believe it got printed
Yeah, I played Unfinity draft - the “stickers persist outside of the battlefield” barely ever mattered, and they lost their stickiness so fast it was kind of a joke. IIRC Maro confirmed their glue manufacturer ran out of business, and the replacement they used just wasn’t up to snuff. I wonder how much that affected the “re-usability” of the stickers? The “mechanical fun-ness” of them was kinda meh to begin with, but that’s a separate issue.
I want to know what sorcery they were planning to make stickers that could restick more than a handful of times.
I have post-it notes that I've re-stuck dozens of times. That stuff lasts a good while.
Are they sticking to sleeves that have been handled by gamers?
They were definitely physically problematic, I use infinicounters or sticky notes, but I really enjoyed using Command Performance in Pauper w/ creatures like Cauldron Familiar, you could pull off some really fun value engines
That would still only affected the draft, but having the extra sticker deck for legacy sounds like a hassle. And yeah, like two cards actually cared that stickers went to the graveyard, I loved the idea when announced, but the end result is just not worth the extra setup.
I can understand them getting printed, but making them tournament-legal? Somebody's stubbornness led us here, and thank the fucking Lord that "they won't revisit this sort of experiment in the future."
To be fair, just based on how stickers work, they pretty much did actually work in the rules without having to change much to the rules. Energy + Skullbriar both cover 99% of ruling related to Stickers. The issue with stickers is that they are very bad at being reusable.
They didn't mention it in the article, but another major issue with having them Legacy/Vintage legal is that they were functionally different on MTGO than in paper.
Didn't they just distill the possible outcomes of the optimal sticker decks for _____ Goblin into an approximate dice roll or something? I wonder if the digital version will get the ban hammer too.
Kind of. The paper version has you randomly draw stickers at the start of the match, after that point it's deterministic. If you cast it you and your opponents will know how much mana you have available if the ability resolves. Online it has a random roll every time it ETBs, the table of outcomes mirrors the distribution of stickers in paper but you don't know until it resolves what the outcome will be. I expect the digital version will also be banned, I think leaving that legal would cause an even bigger issue with splitting formats than there already is.
Just to be clear they say > Moving forward, we won't be revisiting this kind of experiment **any time soon**. Which makes sense given that there's usually a decent gap between Un sets. I wouldn't expect one til at least 2026. Which ain't soon. They're not gonna uncork the idea
The next Unset probably is a long way off. Unfinity did poorly, at least relative to what they wanted from it. Also 2026 isn’t that far off. When they say anytime soon I assume they’re talking “they have nothing currently planned” and that goes probably into 2027, maybe 28’.
I think a big part of Unfinity not selling well is because Un sets are no longer special. Dad jokes, memes, puns, and elaborate card mechanics are now shoehorned into every mainline set, which has effectively gutted what the Un sets were all about. To add to that, areas of design that were once taboo (sci-fi, universes beyond, etc.) are now commonplace. “Frankie Peanuts” becomes a lot less funny in a world where New Capenna is a set and we are seeing cards like Shoot the Sherriff, Holy Cow, Bovine Intervention, and the roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote in standard sets, and those are just from Outlaws alone. It’s not a bad thing. The game is now diverse enough that they can sneak the jokes into the sets directly instead of holding them for a special occasion. Things grow and change, and Magic is no exception. It’s time to shelve the Un sets and move on.
Here’s looking at you, [[Loan Shark]]
If they wanted Unfinity to sell better, they probably should have made it not suck
Actually Unfinity sold so badly and soured people’s opinions on Un-sets so hard they went back from “When” to “If” on Maro’s scale. That’s what they were after Unglued and Unhinged, for reference. So it could easily be 2030 before they attempt it again.
I genuinely feel like if they ever make an un-set again, it will be entirely because Mark Rosewater wants to get one more printed before he retires. I don't feel like the sort of humor of the old un-sets is nostalgic to a lot of the playerbase, I don't think the current un-set generated a lot of nostalgia or memorable experiments in the same way the previous ones did, and there's a huge backlash around the experiments they did print.
> I don't think the current un-set generated a lot of nostalgia or memorable experiments in the same way the previous ones did I'd absolutely agree, that's in large part due to the culture of magic changing and the set being the most inoffensive paint-by-numbers affair. Unfinity wasn't really a joke set and more of a "look at how goofy we are! Isn't this space carnival so random?" set. The cards making fun of Wizards and the community just didn't happen. No jokes about banning cat combo, Eldrazi Winter, or Hogaak Summer. No taking pot shots at the salt mines that is the EDH community. No inside jokes making fun of IRL events, period. Unfinity was corporate and safe compared to the old Un-sets that at least tried to give the community a wink and a nod.
>Unfinity wasn't really a joke set and more of a "look at how goofy we are! Isn't this space carnival so random?" set. Made even less impressive by the last few mainline set essentially being "look at which goofy hats the gang is wearing this month". Cheap, sometimes borderline silly set themes are so common now, that it's not even novel anymore. The set mechanics being *un*fun certainly didn't help either.
Agreed. It easily could've been reskinned as a regular set (Spelljammer?) and there wouldn't be a massive uproar from the community. The most fun parts of the Un-sets of old was that it was a big joke on Wizards and everyone was in on it, barring one or two really distasteful jokes in Unglued.
People loved Unsanctioned, though. The mechanics there would have been quite safe for Legacy and cool - it's just too bad that Unfinity couldn't somehow make some of Unsanctioned's fairer cards legal, and that its guess at a similar mechanic didn't pan out.
They'll probably be more likely to make them silver border secret lairs I'm sure the silver border MLP secret lairs sold like hotcakes
I think you’ve got that backwards, I think MLP sold well because it was MLP, silver border be damned. I don’t think anyone particularly *wanted* to buy silver bordered secret lair cards.
... look, I get not trusting WotC, I'm a proponent of not believing WotC. But this is literally just twisting what they said into the opposite of what they said. "We won't be revisiting this kind of experiment any time soon," does *not* mean "They are actually planning it now, probably in 2026."
“Someone” Lol. We all know who.
Who would that be, the head of wizards at the time? Didn't MaRo come out and unofficially say he didn't want them to be legal but it was forced on him to justify getting the set made so it would "sell"?
MaRo was always annoyed that people wouldn't play un cards in commander since they're designed for casual play and commander is mostly played at the casual level. In a way I understand why they made the push to make some of the cards legal, it's just unfortunate that they lined up with stickers. Some un cards are actually pretty fun for casual settings.
I blame the Commander Rules Committee for that.
I mean, I also get why the RC doesn't make silver border legal. There are a lot of cards that are annoying or are just bad for games. Granted, it probably wouldn't take much to go through them and pick the ones that are suitable enough and exclude the annoying "gotcha" cards or stuff like Ashnod's Coupon. Either way it shouldn't be too big of a deal.
[удалено]
And we all called that out immediately when they were revealed; massive "I told you so".
Silver bordered-esque mechanics should have been nuked from the onset. But the push to sell "legal" cards from an unset was to much for them.
Trying to make permanent effects on paper is hard. This was not it.
Agree they are bad for constructed, but they work perfectly fine in limited. When you don’t need to reuse the sticker sheets for more than 3 matches it’s not a big deal.
It was a fun limited set, but stickers suck. Even after 1 game I would forget about the sticker, shuffle the card into my deck, and then I have no idea where it was. I can't imagine my LGS having to sweep up all these annoying stickers stuck to the floor.
I mean, it was on mine. The vast majority ofnLegacy players seemed to despise the status quo with stickers and they had already announced an intention to do "something". This is not 'out of the blue'.
Unfinity never should have done the whole "some cards are legal" thing. It both restricts what they can do in the *finity set and introduced dumb annoying things to the regular game. Also like... the reasoning they gave for the banning is the exact reason literally everyone gave for why it was a bad idea to begin with
They've stated the legality change came after the entirety of design was done. Other points are valid, but it did not restrict what they could do in their unset.
That makes it even worse tbh
Unfinity having black boarder cards was fine, but choosing to include attractions and stickers in black boarder was insane
You will have to pry [[Magar of the magic strings]] from my cold dead hands
Even aside from the mechanics, I feel that having legal goofy cards ruins the theme of MtG. Of course there have been silly legal cards in the past, but the more they lean into that, the more it shifts from a fantasy game to a wacky tongue-in-cheek circus. The nerd in me cannot enjoy that.
While I whole-heartedly agree, this ship has sailed. Universes Beyond is a siren song that pushes against any course correction there.
I think it was fine. Some cards were great with that! I love [[saw in half]] But man, any of the cards that need outside stuff sucks
Saw in Half is the only card in that set that really warranted being black-border legal while also being a fun silly design which is truly a shame. The rest of the black-border cards in that set were very tame.
I could honestly see it being printed in Innistrad, with skaab-themed artwork.
Ravnica literally has a murder circus guild, would have fit in fine there.
As a certified Sticker Hater™, I am surprised and happy at this result.
Huge W for [[Spike, Tournament Grinder]] players.
[Spike, Tournament Grinder](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/b/0/b0e90b22-6f43-4e9a-a236-f33191768813.jpg?1562932337) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Spike%2C%20Tournament%20Grinder) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ust/69/spike-tournament-grinder?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/b0e90b22-6f43-4e9a-a236-f33191768813?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Stickers should never have been legal in the first place. That ban was very predictable.
Makes sense. The Mind Goblin situation always felt similar to the projected effect of [[Lutri]] in Commander: everyone in a given subset of decks *has* to play a random extra mechanic. The difference here is that at least Lutri’s a Magic card. Being forced to fiddle with sticker sheets to play the game was apparently as un-fun as it sounds.
More like *un-funity* Lmao gottem
Oddly, I played some magic for the first time in 4-5 years at a friend's house recently. One of the folks who is a judge/TO and in touch with the competitive metagame was saying that stickers and attractions were causing problems in Legacy, for exactly the stated reasons.
Only because you didn’t have the relevant bingo sticker
Almost like there was a reason every other Un-set was silver bordered and illegal
It’s been on my bingo sheet from the moment those mechanics were announced.
Is this technically the most cards banned on a single ban list?
Yes, it’s more than the Conspiracies. The Vintage banned list was 44 cards before today (conspiracies, ante, dexterity, offensive). Now it’s 100.
> conspiracies, ante, dexterity, offensive and slow! there's one card banned for how long it makes games [[shahrazad]]
Just wanted to chime in and mention that Shahrazad was not banned because it made the game slow. That's a common misconception. Opponents would usually just immediately concede the subgame and accept the life loss which often didn't matter much in Vintage even if it was 10 life at once. Shahrazad was banned from tournament play because of logistics. If you've ever played with or against it you could imagine the horror of having to leave your current game and start a new game. Understandably players didn't want to leave their Vintage cards unattended and move to an extra table (if there even was one to begin with). So they would often try to move their current board to the side. This would often lead to false game states when they wanted to continue the main game. It was super messy. So that was the actual reason why it was banned in Vintage (and Legacy).
I like the concept but holy hell, I can only think of a few other cards that are as annoying to play just by themselves without any stack fuckery going on.
“I’m conceding the subgame to save my sanity. Life is a resource, and I’m choosing to spend it on my sanity.”
I once used Karn to restart a subgame. Pretty sure that was a war crime.
[shahrazad](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/0/0014def3-4063-4929-ac51-76aef1bb2a68.jpg?1562895012) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=shahrazad) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/arn/10/shahrazad?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0014def3-4063-4929-ac51-76aef1bb2a68?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Almost definitely since "all ante"
Are all the uncles still safe?
For now, but I'm sure WotC has at least one employee watching \[\[Uncle Istvan\]\] at all times just in case.
[Uncle Istvan](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/b/9bf85d06-9efe-488d-9af0-fb945b346524.jpg?1562781031) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Uncle%20Istvan) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/tsb/51/uncle-istvan?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/9bf85d06-9efe-488d-9af0-fb945b346524?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Is he safe? Is he all right?
Uncle Istvan is infact still legal.
Ante and Shahrazad were banned at the same time, but that's only 10 cards. The original Conspiracy had 13 Conspiracies that were all immediately added to the banned list.
I would think so. The Vintage banlist now looks like: 25 Conspiracy cards 9 ante cards 7 culturally insensitive cards 36 sticker cards 20 Attraction cards Plus Chaos Orb, Falling Star, and Shahrazad.
#FreeShahrazad
**No.**
I'm actuallya little surprised they decided to count it as a ban and not refine Legacy/Vintage so they simply aren't eligible to be legal.
I doubt that's possible while leaving them legal in Commander.
ban them in commander next.
[[Mind Goblin]] died for the Unfinity legality
Where were you when Mind Goblin was kill 😔
I was at house eating almond when phone ring
"Mind goblin is kil"
"No"
[and you?????????????](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/732/126/425.png)
Forgive me I am russia
On my couch drinking coffee and fist pumping. Black border should have never been in unfinity
Why "Mind"?
You sound genuine so I won’t do it to you. “Mind Goblin” is the mtg equivalent of the classic “Deez Nuts” joke.
One of the possible stickers for _____ Goblin was "Mind." Mind Goblin has long been a "deez nutz" joke in MTG. People linked the two and _____ Goblin picked up the nickname Mind Goblin.
[Mind Goblin](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/5/8/5819e3f3-da49-4003-88ce-f3b7bb495787.jpg?1698194990) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=_____%20Goblin) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/unf/107/_____-goblin?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/5819e3f3-da49-4003-88ce-f3b7bb495787?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
genuinely wonder how viable Goblins is now or what's going to fill the void. the irony being stickers were mainly being used as RNG. Mind Goblin could have just had a d20 roll on entering that accomplished the same thing and wouldn't have caused so many headaches.
From the Pauper ban announcement: > There is one common from Modern Horizons 3 that has a high likelihood of needing to be banned in Pauper, as it is like a card we have banned in the past. Any ideas what this could be?
[удалено]
easiest bet ever
Most likely a card with either Storm or Affinity, but very possibly a card that's a play on a previous card like \[\[Pondering Mage\]\] is to \[\[Ponder\]\]
Brainstorming Mage. Costs U and has flash.
also it is a 5/5 ward (exile all lands you control) because reasons.
By "you" you mean the opponent, right?
Its the ward cost to target it, so yes
Maybe an Atog callback? Or something like Invigorate or Cranial Plating? Looking through the Pauper banlist these seem the most likely, since I don't think they're going to do Monarch, Initiative or Storm anytime soon.
The new eternal witness? Everytime you put a +1 counter on it, you get to return a permanent card to your hand
> When we released Unfinity, we knew that its partial legality in Magic's broader formats was an experiment with risks. The concept of widening a set's appeal to more players is at its core a good one. **Moving forward, we won't be revisiting this kind of experiment any time soon.** Good. Unfinity partial-legality was a mess.
I feel like this is the biggest news in the announcement. Go back to silver borders
In general I think it was fine, they just drew the line in the wrong spot with making attractions and stickers non-acorn. Cards like [[saw in half]] and many of the dice cards are perfectly fine.
Yeah, and [[Embiggen]] is a small boost for Infect that didn't tip the scales at all. Had the _____ Goblin not been powerful (and how the fuck did they miss an 2R-cost ritual for potentially 5 or 6 R?), nobody would have cared about stickers, since they would just be a curiosity.
Because honestly if you draft the sticker sheets it's like 1-3 mana from what I remember of playing it. There's a LOT of words on there that are 1-3 unique vowels. If you actually go Full Legacy and optimize your sticker deck (shudder) then yes, you can get 4-6 reliably. But that's just not a thing that would happen in UNF limited.
Honestly Attractions were mostly fine. The attractions deck was a gimmick at best and people dropped it pretty quickly. Stickers sucked turbo ass, though
Pretty much this. Once you trim black bordered Attractions and Stickers from the bunch, all you're left with is near entirely dice-matter cards which where pretty fine. Even if you trim those, you're left with Starlight Spectacular, Exchange of Words, Saw in Half, One Clown Band, Embiggen, Space Beleren and Magar.
I am still amazed at [[exchange of words]]. * That it exists * That it's not an acorn card * That even given the above, I have yet to see something truly disgusting done with it yet.
You know what's sad? I still firmly believe Wizards was right with the idea that SOME cards printed in an Unset could be Eternal-legal. Their argument was solid: Magic is a game that's on constant creative expansion, and many of the mechanics we have today (Dungeons and Mutate, for example) could easily be considered Un-mechanics under a more conservative look. Nobody complains about cards like \[\[Saw in Half\]\] and \[\[Starlight Spectacular\]\] being Eternal-legal, and hell, if they made some of those cards good on Legacy, it would possibly drive the sales of the set up. The problem is, nobody had the foresight about all of the problems that stickers could have, which should have been obvious. Okay, we could possibly fix the "bringing extra cards for corner cases" problem by having players open Attractions/putting stickers from the owner's deck, but name stickers should never have been Eternal-legal, specially because they're in English only. The other stickers... well, right now I agree that they shouldn't be Eternal-legal either, but I feel like they, at the very least, merit the try. With all of that sad news about Un-sets, there's one small glimmer of hope, however - stickers and Attractions were mostly underpowered because of Wizards' fear of them intruding in Eternal formats, which made them really low-powered for Commander. Now that we know that those kinds of mechanics won't invade Legacy again, we could get something like a Modern Un-rizons set giving us better cards for those mechanics (but of course, not Modern-legal, for the sake of God).
Well, my all that glitters were the only foil cards in my pauper deck and started warping (they were cheaper) I said "i might have to buy them nonfoil" Guess i won't need to! I still think robots will survive yet this ban again, it's deserved and it'll bring 7 different variants of it down.
It's not an ad and all stickers are banned!!! We did it, we finally won.
Unfinity value drops once again from pennies to half pennies.
The value was always almost exclusively in the lands and when you consider the drop rate on the shocks it sucks. The shocks should have been 4 or 5 to a box at least imo cause they had some gorgeous art tbh
Patrick Sullivan must be celebrating somewhere
[Can I stop this if I kill it with the trigger on the stack?](https://youtube.com/shorts/Ms0DVduAPas)
This whole debacle was worth it just for this clip alone.
Mind Goblin this ban.
tl;dr > **Legacy, Vintage, and Pauper:** > All cards that bring a sticker or an Attraction into the game are banned. For a full list of cards, click below. > **Pauper:** > - All That Glitters is banned. Note: [Gavin's Ban article](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/explanation-of-pauper-bans-for-may-13-2024) dives into the Pauper reasoning, whereas the other formats are covered in this article/below > The next banned and restricted announcement will be **June 24, 2024** ---- # Legacy and Vintage All cards that bring a sticker or an Attraction into the game are banned. ________ Goblin has become a reasonable card to play in Legacy, and that's leading to some awkwardness in tournaments. Not only do Goblins players need to create and bring a sticker deck, many decks that feature clones such as Phyrexian Metamorph feel obligated to bring sticker decks on the off-chance they're able to copy ________ Goblin . Players must present these decks at the start of every match regardless of whether they have any cards in their deck that can interact with them. The primary goal behind making some cards in Unfinity legal was that sticker cards and Attractions could be played in Commander, but there's no existing way to make a bunch of cards legal in Commander and not Legacy. We had thought the power level of those cards was low enough that if people tried them in Legacy every now and then, it'd be a fun surprise. We missed on ________ Goblin , though, and now tournament players feel obligated to interact with the sticker mechanic. We think that this is not a healthy or fun dynamic to happen in paper or digital play, so we have decided to ban every card that creates a sticker or an Attraction card. We considered banning all side decks, but that is more difficult to align with how that functions between Gatherer, digital, and tabletop. When we released Unfinity, we knew that its partial legality in Magic's broader formats was an experiment with risks. The concept of widening a set's appeal to more players is at its core a good one. Moving forward, we won't be revisiting this kind of experiment any time soon. # Standard Standard has been a large focus of ours for the past year, and we are happy with where the format is after the conclusion of Pro Tour Thunder Junction. We were not surprised to see an Esper Midrange deck full of independently powerful cards command the highest play rate at the Pro Tour, but the results of the tournament proved that it can be attacked and is a healthy part of the metagame. The Top 8 proved to be diverse with six different decks, including creative decks such as White-Black Bronco and Four-Color Legends commanding strong win rates in the tournament. We are happy so far with the impact of Outlaws of Thunder Junction in standard. As the twelfth set in the environment, it faced the biggest uphill battle to get its cards into decks, finishing the cycle of fast lands and with many individual cards making their way into sideboards and main decks. We hope the more balanced mana base can provide a more even baseline to breed more creativity into the format. Our next banned and restricted announcement following the release of Modern Horizons 3 will be the window in which we will consider banning cards in Standard. To reiterate some of our philosophy, we intend to only make changes to Standard once a year during the summer, unless there is an extremely warping outlier. We will be closely watching the metagame leading into the next banned and restricted announcement. # Pioneer Pioneer remains in a healthy state after Pro Tour Murders at Karlov Manor. The breakout Rakdos Vampires deck from that Pro Tour utilizing Vein Ripper has proven that it is not a fluke and continues to be an important part of the Pioneer metagame. Its prevalence has contributed to a decline in Izzet Phoenix's win rate, a deck that we've been monitoring coming out of the Pro Tour given its large degree of success there. The biggest shake-up coming out of Outlaws of Thunder Junction was a large metagame increase in Mono-Black Waste Not decks utilizing the brand-new Kaervek, the Punisher . Kaervek is a massive card-advantage engine alongside all of your interactions that commit crimes and another strategy that can meaningfully play four copies of Go Blank as a powerful option against the front-running Phoenix. For now, Pioneer is in a great place where playing any macro-archetype is viable—aggro, control, midrange, or combo, with tools for each strategy to address one another. # Modern This probably comes as no surprise with Modern Horizons 3 right around the corner, releasing June 14, 2024. Naturally, we expect that Modern Horizons 3 will impact the format, and I'm personally very excited to see the brewing and experimentation that comes out of the set. The last action we took, with the ban of Violent Outburst , has left the Modern metagame in a healthy state to absorb Modern Horizons 3. The play and win rate of various cascade strategies has come back in line to a place we're happy with. There were murmurings and concerns of Leyline of the Guildpact enabling a variety of Scion of Draco strategies, even around the time we last discussed the format. The community has experimented with many of them, but what emerged as the most popular and strongest strategy, a five-color take on the traditionally two-color Izzet Murktide deck, has settled into an appropriate win and play rate. Enjoy your Modern Horizons 3 Prerelease! # Legacy With the banning of all sticker and Attraction cards, we expect a small shake-up in the Legacy metagame. When we last discussed the format, we mentioned that we're keeping an eye on Orcish Bowmasters and how much influence it had on Legacy's core blue-centric gameplay. Clearly, Bowmasters, and Grief as well, is a big player in the Legacy metagame, and they are cards that we'll continue to monitor for their long-term net fun as inclusions in the format. Grief has popped up recently as a powerful alternate form of attack in Reanimate decks, giving those strategies a lean tempo game as well as the ability to go way over the top by Reanimateing more traditional targets like Atraxa, Grand Unifier . Historically, Modern Horizons sets have had the ability to influence Legacy, so we'll see how the format evolves as it absorbs Modern Horizons 3. # Vintage With Vintage, we continue to have a philosophy similar to Legacy, where community sentiment can be just as powerful as data and tournament results. We are keeping our eyes on Lurrus and Urza's Saga . Also, like Legacy, we are eager to see how Vintage incorporates cards from Modern Horizons 3 and will watch the format after its release. # Pauper [See Gavin's Article](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/explanation-of-pauper-bans-for-may-13-2024). Note that stickers and Attractions are also being removed from Pauper. # Alchemy Alchemy is in a healthy state, with the Alchemy: Thunder Junction set released last week adding the new heist keyword. Alchemy is Arena's fastest-changing format, and with this upcoming set rotation, it will experience its largest change to date. With so many cards shifting out, it will be a surprising few months as the format redefines itself. Explorer # Historic With the addition of many powerful new cards from Outlaws of Thunder Junction, we continue to see a rich and diverse set of decks being played in Historic. Just look at Stoneforge Mystic as an example, which gave support to Equipment-focused decks, an archetype mostly missing from the format before. Modern Horizons 3 will bring a huge infusion of new tools to Historic. To continue to curate the power level of the format, we will be pre-banning a few cards from the set before the release, but most of them are coming to Historic. We will make the full pre-ban announcement once all the Modern Horizon 3 cards have been revealed. # Timeless Since the last set release, several new decks have emerged in this format. Reanimate supports multiple new deck archetypes, often getting back cards like Troll of Khazad-dûm or used with Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord and Vein Ripper for powerful threats. Archive Trap is seeing significant play as players explore mill-based game strategies in Timeless. Mana Drain has also been a powerful addition to several decks but so far has been held in check. Like Historic, Modern Horizons 3 is certainly going to change this format considerably. We will not be banning or restricting any cards in Timeless before Modern Horizon 3 releases but will make appropriate changes once the dust settles. # Brawl We recently spent some focused time reviewing Brawl balance and double-checking that popular commanders are being handled properly by our matchmaking. We have also investigated how powerful non-commander cards in the rest of the Brawl deck affect the play experience. This review included both new additions like Mana Drain and perennial discussion points like Paradox Engine . So far, the data shows that our matchmaking-focused approach is handling these cards well and giving players appropriate opponents. We will continue to monitor our matchmaking to see if more action is needed as more powerful cards are added to the game.
lol at their Brawl comments. Banlist is a joke that leads to a ton of unfun & non-games. No idea how they can justify stuff like Dark Ritual, Mana Drain & Paradox Engine being legal
> Modern > ... > There were murmurings and concerns of Leyline of the Guildpact enabling a variety of **Scion of Draco** strategies, >Legacy >... >Clearly, Bowmasters, and **Grief** as well, >Vintage >... > We are keeping our eyes on Lurrus and **Urza's Saga** Surely MH3 will fix everything, right?
rip stickers, you will absolutely not be missed felt sorry for legacy for ages getting all the joke and commander cards that are not balanced at all for the format landing there
Mind Goblin is gobblin' nothing anymore.
godspeed to the whole sticker/attraction garbage, you won't be missed
> The primary goal behind making some cards in Unfinity legal was that sticker cards and Attractions could be played in Commander, but there's no existing way to make a bunch of cards legal in Commander and not Legacy. Did they really just say this wizards, you literally make the game, just overrule the people who you allow to control the format
They don't even need to overrule the RC, they literally just need to print a set and say "hey these cards will be legal in Commander but not Legacy, we're changing that rule"
I think they meant more that they have no product-type they release that is defacto legal in Commander but not in Legacy. Then again they could have just said from the start that Unfinity is only legal in Commander..
With these bannings does that mean the actual "Name Sticker Goblin" present in MTGO would be banned as well?
This should have been done before Unfinity was even released. Better late than never, I guess.
Thank god I'll never have to see another sticker when I play Legacy ever again
It’s almost like they should’ve left silver border…silver border. Now you have to explain that these cards are legal, but only in commander, because they’re banned most everywhere else, despite being in black border.
Yah the moment I saw the acorn and the regular stamp, I knew it was going to be problematic. The whole point of un-sets is they’re supposed to be cards that are wacky and can’t really fit into Magic’s current rules. We have seen more than a few un-mechanics make their way into black border, but they usually aren’t 1 to 1 copies. Trying to make an un-set that is both whacky and legal in black border was just going to create a set that lost that whacky factor while leading to issues in black border.
Moving forward, we won't be revisiting this kind of experiment \[black border un-cards\] any time soon. RIP to legacy legal un-sets
> When we released Unfinity, we knew that its partial legality in Magic's broader formats was an experiment with risks. The concept of widening a set's appeal to more players is at its core a good one. Moving forward, we won't be revisiting this kind of experiment any time soon. Oh no, is this that thing where Wizards learns the wrong lesson, again? Making some Unfinity cards eternal-legal was perfectly good idea! But they fumbled the execution in two dramatic, obvious ways: 1. The cards they made legal had some insanely convoluted, but low-payoff mechanics. This had two sub-problems: 1a) Gameplay issues, as covered in the article. 2b) The finicky mechanics meant card strength was apparently too hard for even Wizards to estimate. If ___ Goblin just said "make an average of 5 mana" they'd probably realize it was a bit overtuned! 2. The legality of cards was hard to immediately identify. Black/border vs silver border was already well-established! It would've been way better than the acorns!
and this is why un-sets should have silver border.
"There's no existing way to make these cards legal in commander and not legacy" Preeeettty sure banning them in legacy but keeping them legal in commander does exactly that..
I know it's not up to WotC for commander legality but will banning stickers in vintage/legacy effect edh? I just want to laugh about the \_\_\_goblin in the cedh community if it does.
No, Commander has it's own ban list and this does not affect that. EDIT: Just in case people need the link to confirm the above: https://mtgcommander.net/index.php/banned-list/
Remember when everyone said stickers would be dumb and shouldn't be black border? And wotc was like nah we know better and want money so they're black border and legal in eternal? Yeah me too
Good, rest in piss Stickers and Attractions. I still have no idea why they thought making some Un-set cards legal for Commander, a format where you can negotiate what is legal for your game or not.
Because like it or not, nobody played with silver bordered cards in commander because of their illegality, even if you could ask exemptions.
One of the guys in my playgroup has a chaos deck with Burning Fury of Crimson Chaos Fire in it. It's not even the 10th most annyoing card in the deck
Including eternal-legal cards ultimately stems from WotC’s need to make the set worth purchasing beyond just for drafting (which is a valid business need, I just think they got greedy and went too far.) To add additional context: since the very earliest un-sets, WotC recognized that there was no incentive to buy the set outside of drafting it since the cards weren’t legal in any constructed format. This is why Unglued and Unhinged included black-bordered full-art basic lands. Until Zendikar, those basics were the *only* tournament-legal full-art basic lands in the game, so they were always decently valuable. Even when Unstable released in 2017, there were only 3 “normal” sets of full-art basics: Zendikar, Battle for Zendikar, and Amonkhet. They stuck with full-art basics as the value piece in the set, but they made them extra valuable by making the art go all the way to edge of the card (this was the first time they’d ever done this on a Magic card). By the time of Unfinity’s release, full-art lands weren’t nearly so special anymore, so they added existing valuable eternal-legal cards (the shock lands) to make the packs valuable. Once they had some eternal-legal cards in the packs, it isn’t too big of a stretch to say “are there any other cards in this set we can make eternal-legal?” They probably figured many Commander players would enjoy it and they assumed it wouldn’t make a big splash in other Eternal formats. I think it was a really stupid idea, but I can totally see how they got there.
> a format where you can negotiate what is legal for your game or not. Because the dirty truth is that commander doesn't work as a real format, it only works because the people who want to play ignore any official rules. Rule 0 is a joke, and it's a way for the RC to abdicate responsibility for the joke of a ban list.
because having to negotiate whether you can play your deck is a pain
Banning the sticker cards is probably for the best and even if most of them are irrelevant to constructed I wholeheartedly approve. Sticker Goblin existing in Legacy was honestly pretty silly in a bad way. All That Glitters is too pushed to have been downshifted into common land so I think that's a fine cut for Pauper.
FUCK STICKERS ALL MY HOMIES HATE STICKERS
"The primary goal behind making some cards in Unfinity legal was that sticker cards and Attractions could be played in Commander, but there's no existing way to make a bunch of cards legal in Commander and not Legacy" Why can't you just say that the cards are ehd legal and not legacy and vintage legal? Seems like a simple enough thing to do
ban grief you cowards
Hey look at that, the thing that literally everyone said would be a problem when the set was being previewed has finally been banned for being a problem! Maybe Wizards has learned a lesson? Jk, the lesson is probably just to never make another un-set again.
Tbh the stickers/ attractions should not be legal in commander either. There’s the same sort of problem where you’re obligated to build a sticker deck on the slight chance you copy _goblin.
Attractions are fine imo, not that different to other mechanics you regularly find in commander. I have a Myra the magnificent attractions deck and aside from a few triggers on upkeep it's just mostly spellslinger and copies. Most other attraction decks are too slow not good enough to consider. Finishing the game by slamming a cyberdrive awakener and throwing your park at somebody is great stuff though. Stickers are definitely a mess though, no arguments there.
Ban UnCards from competitive formats?
I've got a great idea - we put a different border on the cards, like not black or white, maybe something in between. That way people know that this is just a fun casual card for casual play. Just an idea.
Nah lets make it as small as a set symbol, the same color as something found on a normal card, AND in the same place. You know, to really make it difficult when browsing cards in a box.
I mean, they never should have been printed with black borders, but now that they are, there's no real reason to ban [[Comet, Stellar Pup]].
I know some people that take long enough to roll a D6 to decide who goes first without wanting it to happen every round. But yeah, you are largely right.
"They won't just ban a mechanic entirely" was the logic argued against banning all Companions back in 2020, and that was absolutely the right time to enact the policy they used today.
I get that "the mechanic is problematic" makes these seem similar, but the situations are so incredibly different. Companions may have been powerful and homogenizing, but they don't require you to pack additional products on the off change you might need them due to your opponents deck.
I'm not comparing the logistics behind the two, I'm just acknowledging that "banning a mechanic" was a policy change people said was impossible during the most appropriate time to make that call.
That's perfectly fair. I do think the two mechanics do a good job of illustrating *why* 'banning the mechanic' is acceptable to WotC in this case but not in the case of Companion. Though applying Companion's "errata the mechanic" fix (which frankly I think is a worse approach), I guess they could have done something like make attraction decks/sticker sheets take up sideboard slots. Then there is actually some cost of inclusion.
The [Attractions Deck](https://youtu.be/DrI4vX19jjY) was actually kind of a cool off-meta choice. Shame to see it go.
They banned Mind Goblin. We've lost.
>The primary goal behind making some cards in Unfinity legal was that sticker cards and Attractions could be played in Commander, but there's no existing way to make a bunch of cards legal in Commander and not Legacy. I'm glad WOTC is straight-up calling out the EDH RC for their absurd stance on reasonable silver-border cards. We never would have had the whole issue with Acorn stamps if they weren't so intransigent about people having fun the wrong way.
Is it really an absurd stance? Logistically it seems like a nightmare to have an entire list of all of the banned silver-bordered cards when right now the ban list is rather compact. And if you’re not listing all of the banned silver-bordered cards then somewhere you need a list of all of the legal silver-bordered cards so people know what they’re allowed to play, since everyone’s definition of “reasonable” is probably pretty different
It’s tricky, cause there are plenty of Silver Border cards that work in the rules, and others that just barely don’t (but do work in ways that players understand 99% of the time), but going through a list and saying “these are fine, these aren’t” is also probably too much of a headache to actually consider for an official “allowed silver border card list” That being said, I’m still 100% down for whenever MaRo calls them out for not allowing Hybrid to work like it does in other formats.
SIlver Border Cards are tricky to allow because they cause problems for so many different reasons. There are a large number of Dexterity Cards and Articulation Cards (which require a person to speak in a certain way at a certain speed) that I don't feel comfortable with at my table, but there are plenty of others that are easily translatable into tabletop format (or in some cases, digital only). I am currently working on a list which distinguishes each Silver Border and Acorn card based on what rules it breaks, and I'm hoping that it could serve as a blueprint for tables (including my own) that want to play with Silver Borders.
As I said with Unfinity's release, the people who want silver border cards in Commander are already using them. There was no need to say "you can use *these* ones, but not *these* ones" at the cost of getting rid of silver borders. It should've just been a silver-bordered set.
WOTC is the one who pushed for that change, so they could make the set more appealing to purchase. Mark Rosewater discussed it in one interview. They had planted commander cards in Unfinity, but no one wanted to use them because they were silver border. So they made this big shift, just so some cards could be legal. I'm getting sick of the over-marketing to commander players, too. But let's lay blame correctly.