What we talk about when we talk about pioneer bans
The group chat for my Pioneer locals doesn’t seem very happy with me. In the wake of the recent banned and restricted announcement (26/08/24), I keep insisting that Amalia was innocent, that my lifegain vampire gal did nothing wrong, and died for the sins of a community that likes to complain on Reddit. And I stand by that, mostly.
I think bans were probably a long time coming for pioneer; rightly or wrongly, people thought that the format had been dominated by the same decks for too long, and that they promoted play patterns that weren’t always the most fun and interesting. Rather than re-litigating that, instead I’ve been thinking about what we can learn from the cards that got banned, and those that were “under consideration.”
In short, the bans of Amalia and Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord (the latter presumably hit over Vein Ripper, the big beast he would cheat out, because a card like Sorin potentially limits design space in the same way that, say, Winota, Joiner of Forces did back in the day) seem to be placing a hard ceiling on the power level that can be expected from Pioneer as a format. The simple way of thinking about that is that pioneer is not a format in which games will regularly be allowed to end on turn three. And that, in theory, is fine. It’s a reasonable argument for bans, and also does something to give Pioneer a kind of definitive format identity: one where games can be slower, and certain kinds of decks are able to rise back to prominence. Now, whether or not that will actually happen, or if we’ll return to the Rakdos Midrange/Devotion to Green/Izzet Phoenix meta of yesteryear remains to be seen. I know what I’d put my money on, but that’s beside the point.
What might have been more interesting about the bans is the cards that they were talking about, heavily considering, but in the end not actually banning. Those cards were, of course, Treasure Cruise, and Fable of the Mirror Breaker // Reflection of Kiki-Jiki. There are lots of reasons why its a good thing that neither of those cards got banned; and I think that if Wizards wants to keep giving Pioneer a distinctive identity beyond Standard Plus or Modern Without Fetches, keeping these cards in the format forever is the best approach.
The common reasons why Fable and Cruise seem to constantly be in the community’s crosshairs for bans seem to be some combination of their power level and longevity. Amidst the constant clamouring for these most recent bans was the idea that Treasure Cruise should go because Phoenix has been good for too long. To me, this seems to undercut the entire point of non-rotating formats, in which good decks are good for a long time and players can invest in a deck and know that, even if they take a break from playing Pioneer, that same pile of lands and spells will - with the minor tweaks that come from an endless deluge of product - still be playable. And no matter what you replace it with - whether its Dig Through Time or an unbanned Expressive iteration, which people really liked the idea of - anything other than Cruise in the deck makes Phoenix a functionally unplayable deck, for some simple reasons.
Two is a much bigger number than one. The tempo loss of needing an extra land, an extra turn, before being able to reanimate Birds is a huge difference maker for a deck like Phoenix which relies on both a critical mass of spells, and enough cheap interaction to stay alive.
While Iteration is undoubtedly a powerful (after all, it got banned), and Dig is a great card in the right shell, they don’t give Phoenix what it needs from a card like Cruise: the ability to generate card advantage. Iteration and DTT both go +1 but that might not be enough if you’re top-decking or low on resource in some capcity.
Besides, as much as people like to complain about the continual meta share of Phoenix, the deck is good in the same way that Murktide is good in Modern: people like to play interactive decks that include Islands, and the deck has a high enough skill ceiling that even if it shows up a lot at events, the extent to which people can win with it rewards understanding the deck’s nuances (something that often gets touted as a point Pioneer’s favour as a format).
The same is true of Fable, and Rakdos Midrange. For all of the discussion of Fable being an incredibly ubiquitous, homogenizing card, its not like every deck running red also runs Fable - Phoenix, for instance doesn’t play it and neither does Gruul Boats, a deck that will probably be on the ascendancy to target the return of Rakdos Midrange. And this ignores the fact that casting fun, powerful cards feels good, and that there’s a place for them in a format like Pioneer when they are powerful but fundamentally fair. The cards that recently got banned all fundamentally “broke” something, either by cheating out giant creatures, or generating loops that can even force draws. But Fable, for all of its power, is just a fair midrange card, and is strong enough that, when it was printed in Neon Dynasty, it was able to put Rakdos on the map as a playable midrange deck. And every format should have a strong midrange deck, a pile of good cards that’s able to police some of the more degenerate things happening around the edges of the format. In the same way that removing Cruise from the format would also take Phoenix with it (and create an existential crisis for the format since one of the points of it not having fetches is the ability to play fun, powerful delve spells like Cruise), banning Fable would technically open up the possibility of playing midrange decks that aren’t in red, but none of them would really be strong enough to compete. For all of the discourse around Fable “forcing” people to play red midrange, one of the reasons you don’t see any non-red midrange decks in a post-Fable world is that there weren’t any pre-Fable; the deck is strong enough that it can be the glue holding together a pile of powerful, fundamentally fair cards. And that is fine and good, that is something that should be in every format.
As much as I don’t necessarily agree 100% with the recent bans, or some of the most loudly proclaimed reasons why they had to happen, I think that they have the potential to be a good step forward for Pioneer as a format. Whether or not a hard cap on the power ceiling of the format is a good thing (only time will tell for that one), by doing so the format is given another factor for a clear sense of identity. The problem would be if some of the cards currently “in discussion” for bans end up on the chopping block, and then the question of who, and what the format is for, goes up in the air without anything approaching a clear answer.