Wizards of the Coast has dropped the ban hammer on Field of the Dead in their latest update.
Players probably saw this one coming. As of yesterday, Field of the Dead is banned in Magic: The Gathering’s Standard Format. The land that produced zombies for nothing proved to be too powerful for the current meta, forcing Wizards to step in.
For those unaware, Field of the Dead provides players with a free source of 2/2 zombies so long as they play a land while already having seven or more lands of a different name on the battlefield. This would normally take a long time to achieve, but ramp decks employing the land-fetching effects of Golos, Tireless Pilgrim were able to easily grab 7 differently-named lands and start producing zombies left and right.
So what’s the problem with a bunch of Zombies? As Wizards explains in their update, it became a problem when other deck archetypes started to become irrelevant. Slower, control-themed decks that typically want to stretch their opponent’s resources to the breaking point and win in the long-game were never able to effectively deal with a constant stream of zombies, thus preventing an entire class of decks from being relevant in Standard. The only decks that could compete against Field of the Dead ramp decks were hyper-aggressive red and Planeswalker decks, which made the current meta a bit dull.
Combine that with the fact that Field of the Dead decks often caused games to stretch on for a lot longer than normal, and Wizards of the Coast was forced to just get rid of the problematic card.
But that’s not all. Another problem card was banned yesterday from Magic’s Pauper Format. That’s the one that limits players to only playing cards of common rarity.
The card in question is Arcum’s Astrolabe. On the surface, it seems pretty innocuous: get some “free” mana-fixing and draw a card to replace the Astrolabe. However, this free nature made it almost mandatory in any deck running more than a single color. Since the card replaced itself once used, it essentially meant that Pauper decks running Astrolabe had free mana-fixing and only 56 cards in the deck.
But combined with cards like Kor Skyfisher, Ephemerate, and Trinket Mage, Astrolabe created an incredible card advantage engine that was hard to stop. Decks featuring the Astrolabe were becoming far too common and were warping the meta, so Wizards once again banned it.
We’ll see how these changes affect the Standard and Pauper meta at the Mythic Championship VI tournament later in November.
(Source: Wizards of the Coast)
