This past Monday, we received a ban announcement featuring two cards, one from Standard and one from Modern:
The Meathook Massacre and Yorion, Sky Nomad are both banned in their respective formats.
We’ll get the easy part out of the way: I haven’t played Standard in a long time, so I can’t say whether or not The Meathook Massacre was warranted. I just hope that we have a healthy format by the time I need to learn how to play it for the Regional Championship in Anaheim next spring. I’m pleasantly surprised to see no bans in Pioneer.
I still believe that Mono-Green Devotion is the best deck in Pioneer and that Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx will eventually be banned, but I’m glad Dominaria United introduced enough new tools for other decks to balance the format out for right now.
The ban on Yorion, Sky Nomad is the most important change from this B&R. I believe this was an excellent ban for Modern, but I’m not sure that it went far enough.
Four-Color Control (also known as 4C Omnath or Money Pile) and Four-Color Elementals have been a major presence in Modern for the last year, being at or near the top of the tierlist for most of that time. When we take these two different variants together, they introduce several metagame and logistical challenges to the Modern format.
While it’s a powerful deck, its matchups against other top decks tended to be polarized. It did very well against fair decks playing to the board (it especially preyed on UW Control and Colossus Hammer decks). It often struggled against decks like Living End, Grinding Breah and Burn which have linear gameplans that aren’t dependent on exchanging resources one-for-one (but could make these matchups better by packing its sideboard with hate). This resulted in otherwise powerful decks like Hammertime and UW being less popular at tournaments, because players knew that to win the event they would probably need to beat a Yorion deck at the top tables.
The presence of Yorion also introduced problems in paper tournaments unrelated to its power level. The mana base was centered on using Wrenn and Six in combination with fetchlands to find one of 11 one-of lands (you usually played six shocks, three basics and two triomes). This resulted in the Yorion player shuffling on most of the first six or seven turns of the game, and shuffling takes all the longer when you’re looking for a one-of in an eighty card deck.
It also didn’t win the game quickly and tried to slowly accumulate small pieces of card advantage until the opponent ran out of resources. On a tournament level, this led to more rounds going to time and more unintentional draws, which makes it a longer day for everyone.
On an individual level, the deck was just unfun to play. Shuffling an 80-card deck isn’t pleasant, and the first time I played it at a Nerd Rage Gaming event, I took the inner sleeves off after round one because my hands wouldn’t have been able to take double sleeves for nine rounds. I remember reading some tips from Andrew Elenbogen before picking the deck up, and the one that I always tried to do was always to do my fetching and shuffling while my opponent was taking their turn, and never shuffling their deck, just to make sure we could finish 3 games in time. I’m much happier when things that are outside the game like that don’t influence tournament results.
So what will the format look like with Yorion gone? For starters, Four-Color decks aren’t gone. Yorion was a powerful part, as the long games that Four-Color lost usually involved flooding and running out of gas. Knowing that you’re always going to draw a cantripping ⅘ flier made those games happen much less often. Even with Yorion gone, Wrenn and Six plus Omnath, Locus of Creation is still one of the most powerful synergies in the format and I fully expect to see 60-card control or elemental pile decks putting up numbers in tournaments.
The place I would start would be what Rob Hayes used to win the first two Modern NRG events last fall (decklist). Most Yorion players these days have been running the Counterspell/Expressive Iteration version of the deck rather than the Cavern of Souls/Risen Reef version.
If you want to keep playing the deck, I would recommend the elementals version for two reasons. First, you likely won’t be playing Abundant Growth anymore, which will make it much harder to regularly have double blue early for Counterspell and be able to reliably cast the rest of your spells. Secondly, UW Control and UR Murktide were both decks that did poorly against Four-Color and will likely make a resurgence now.
If lots of people are going to be playing counterspells, I want to have Cavern of Souls in my deck. I wish Wrenn and Six had also been banned because I still don’t like the play patterns of “fetch every single turn” being one of the most powerful things to do in the format.
So what else is going to change? Other than Elementals, the two decks that are looking to gain the most from this ban are Hammertime and UW Control. Hammer is always happy to see fewer Solitudes and Wrenn and Sixes floating around, and Four-Color was one of its worst matchups. With the anticipated uptick in control, I would look into a UW version with multiple copies of Blacksmith’s Skill, like this list from HappySandwich (who top 8s many Modern Challenges on MTGO).
UW Control has strong Hammertime and UR Murktide matchups which I expect to be the two most played decks. It also performs strongly against cascade strategies due to its main deck Chalice of the Voids. Many players have also recently added RIW’s own Raja Sulaiman had an extremely successful weekend at SCG Columbus recently, finishing in the Top 4 of the Friday 20K and winning the Sunday 5K with this decklist. I know that Raja had specifically included so many copies of Subtlety to gain points against Four-Color, so all of those may not be necessary anymore. He also mentioned to me that he has never lost a match to UR Murktide in paper, which I wouldn’t be surprised to see as the most-played deck.
What gets worse? I think that both popular flavors of cascade (Temur Rhinos and Living End) will both end up worse off from this ban. Both had favorable Four-Color matchups (when 4C wasn’t actively targeting them with Chalice of the Void and Flusterstorm), and both had unfavorable matchups against UW control (especially since the adoption of Hallowed Moonlight). I also think Burn’s value at tournaments diminishes when it can’t prey on the slow, ponderous deck with no clock and lots of fetching.
The deck that suffers the worst from this ban will be the Indomitable Creativity combo. It was a strategy that rose to prominence almost solely off of a good Four-Color matchup, but struggles against most of the other top decks. I would still expect it to see play, but you won’t run into byes at the very top of the tournament anymore.
There are a few decks that probably won’t change much. Grinding Breach lost a good matchup, but good matchups in Murktide and Hammer may be on the rise. UR Murktide lost a bad matchup, but other bad matchups like UW will be more popular.
Overall, I think the Yorion ban will be a healthy one for the Modern format and I’m excited to see what the next few tournaments will look like. This one is unique as Modern bans go in that a version of the same deck will still be legal and no deck was axed outright. I think the biggest changes we’ll see will just be a big dropoff in Creativity, but other than that, we’ll see shifts in metagame percentages that will correct over time as people adjust. Going forward, I would keep an eye on the power levels of Wrenn and Six, Shardless Agent, and Expressive Iteration decks, as those are cards that we may need to have ban conversations about in the future. I think that we may end up looking back on this period of time the same way we do at Hogaak Summer. Bridge from Below got banned, but Hogaak was still dominant and they had to ban it as well as Faithless Looting to get back to a healthy format. Will Wrenn and Six be the next Modern Horizons card to get better after its friend got banned? Let me know what you think, and thanks for reading!
