I’ve seen this movie before, and I don’t care for the ending.

You see, rotation is SUPPOSED to be exciting. Rotation is Magic Christmas: the time in the year when 50% of the Standard card base disappears into the aether, a new set enters chat, and everyone gets to build new and exciting decks. It’s usually my favorite time. 

But not this time.

About two hours into the pre-pre-prerelease event for Zendikar Rising, I faced a deck that did the most degenerate thing that I’d ever seen in a Standard game. And as I watched this insanity unfold, I said, “Lotus Cobra is going to be a problem in Standard.” And it is.

It turns out that if you print enough degenerate ramp cards in the same two colors, it’s nearly impossible to play anything else and make it worthwhile. So if you combine a card like Uro with Lotus Cobra (a card that rewards you for putting more lands onto the board) and Omnath, Locus of Creation (which provides a payoff for putting more lands on the board), you get what we have here today.

This morning, Uro was banned. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to make a damn bit of difference. 

So, even with Uro banned, it doesn’t look like it’s going to make much of a difference. Over the weekend, I was already running into four-color Omnath decks that were playing Beanstalk Giant instead of Omnath (presumably practicing for the much-too-obvious decision today). And in the new set, Wizards has already included Scale the Heights, which…huh…allows an extra land drop, draws a card, and gains life. So, in other words, Uro. 

This seems to be an ugly habit that Wizards has repeated for the past couple of years. A broken card or cards is printed in the new set that drives pack sales. The community breaks it immediately. In response, rather than ban the most broken card, Wizards bans one of the older cards that goes with it to little effect. After a month or two of degenerate gameplay, Wizards finally nukes the deck from orbit AFTER all of the packs have been sold. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I feel like, as a writer and someone who shouldn’t be writing blog posts that end in “¯\_(ツ)_/¯”, it’s my vocation to provide a solution to this…to show you a magic deck or a way that Wizards can move forward to solve this problem. But not only do I not think that there IS a solution, I’m no longer sure that Wizards WANTS a solution. I’m starting to feel like this is a feature to Hasbro and not a bug…that printing broken cards is an business strategy designed to sell the biggest number of packs possible. And if they are, in fact, selling said packs, then I guess it’s a viable strategy. 

I’m just not sure that it’s a viable strategy for the long-term health of a game that continues to step on every rake it sees.