(Author’s Note: I’m used to writing articles that I think about over a period of days and edit carefully over even more days in order to give you as good of a product as I can. But I also recognize that there are going to be other times when speed is going to trump contemplation when it comes to current events. So I’m going to try to produce this as fast as I can and see if I can write something that makes sense. Parental discretion advised.)

We knew something was coming, but we had no clue of the extent. On Monday morning, Wizards of the Coast could have put out a nuanced, surgical ban on Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath and possibly one or two other cards.

Instead, they nuked multiple formats from orbit. 

I’m not going to write a TL;DR version of WotC’s article that describes the reasoning behind the bans. I don’t think that I can do it any better than they did, and if I could it wouldn’t be able to communicate the nuances and impact of what happened to Pioneer, Modern, and Legacy today. But rather than go card-by-card through each decision or dissect the percentage of Cascade cards that don’t work the way they used to work under the old rules, I’m going to try to analogize what I think is a continuation of a new philosophy in card production and format maintenance that WotC has attempted over the past year or two.

When we (the enfranchised players of Magic) think about why a card should be banned or not banned, we do it primarily by either a self-focused or a world-focused lens. The self-focused lens is purely that if we (the generic “we”) play a deck that has one of the cards, it shouldn’t be banned. If “we” have lost a lot to a given card, it should be banned. In the world-focused lens (which is more rational), we look at tournament results, win percentages, and answers for a given card and try to determine if a card is simply too good or dominates a format too much. When B&R decisions get discussed online, one of these two lenses is the focus. 

But Wizards is making it clear that those lenses aren’t the ones that they’re looking through.

Yes, both of those lenses provide data that Wizards uses. I have no doubt that they understand tournament results and would like to maintain and curate a diverse, competitive list of good decks in all formats. But this announcement feels different than that. It feels as if Wizards has put together a new mathematical equation that takes all of the above, mixes in a variable based on the average, sporadic FNM or kitchen table player, and mashes it all together into a number that tells whether playing with or against a specific card is “fun”. I have no idea what that number is or would be, and I’m not even going to try to quantify it. But if you look at most of these bannings through the “fun quotient” lens, they make a lot of sense.

Take Simian Spirit Guide, for example. I’ve always though of SSG as one of the iconic cards in the Modern format. SSG has been a key card in enabling fast effects that warp a game into the field of play that its user wants. Turn 1 Blood Moon? SSG. A really fast Tibalt’s Trickery? SSG. A quick Violent Outburst? Yep, SSG again. And yes, Wizards did something to all of those strategies by banning other cards. But if you’re the average Magic player and you sit across from another human being in a match, and that other human being plays SSG, you’re not going to be having fun. Nope. You’re going to be quickly shuffling your deck for game 2. Simian Spirit Guide is not FUN. And if this Fun Quotient is all-powerful, it’s gotta go.

The same holds with the change to the cascade rules. If you’ve been playing Cascade since its creation, it doesn’t bother you. But if you’re a year into Modern, in your mind Cascade means “flip cards until you find something CHEAPER in CMC than the Cascade card, then play that card for free”. You can explain why that isn’t the case until you turn blue, but it’s not going to matter because that’s what the vast majority of your player base thinks that the mechanic does. And if you need twenty minutes to explain the subtle nuances of why you’re Cascading a three-mana card into a seven-mana planeswalker, that’s not only obviously contrary to the intent of the mechanic from its creation, it isn’t fun. It doesn’t make sense. And, by the way, I don’t think this will be the last mechanic that gets edited in such a fashion. I’m expecting that there will eventually be a change to MDFC cards and whether they’re considered to be spells, lands, both, or neither. It’s not obvious that the current answer of “they’re whatever the player playing them wants them to be at any given time to the complete exclusion of the other option” is fun, but since we haven’t gotten that far down the road yet, it’s easier to just ban Balustrade Spy and Undercity Informer until you figure it out. 

There are certainly arguments against this idea. The best one is probably that “fun” is less important or desired in the oldest formats with the most powerful cards, and I agree. If you’re playing Vintage, you’re more likely to put up with a card like Uro because playing with broken cards is pretty much why you’re playing Vintage. But even in Legacy, Wizards wants some quantity of fun. The first line of the Legacy section makes this clear: “While balance hasn’t looked problematic in Legacy, we’ve heard community feedback that a few cards have come to draw too much of the focus for deck building and gameplay.” Translation: “There are cards in Legacy that aren’t enough fun.” And out they go.

It’s hard to understand how playtesting and newer sets will be affected by this in the future, but it seems that Wizards is much more willing to make flashy, powerful cards and ban them later if needed. Uro, Omnath, and Trickery sell packs. And, at least for a bit, those who discover the appropriate interactions have fun. But when the shine is off of the rose, they’re probably going to get banned. I’m curious to know if playtesting even bothered to try Tibalt’s Trickery as a counter to your own stuff, but after the Oko nonsense I would have hoped that they had learned to do so by now. 

So while I’m not expecting any ban announcements in upcoming months as extensive as this one, I think the fun quotient isn’t going away. That random non-grinder at your FNM or the free-to-play person on Arena is going to be much more influential on future decisions that most of the invested MTG community understands. If they don’t think something is fun, then Wizards probably agrees. It’ll be interesting to see if these moves produce fun, or if the pain caused to individuals who now own very expensive doorstops that used to be functional Magic decks overrides it.

So…go have fun! (?)