It has been a bit over four months since a Magic: The Gathering Banned and Restricted Announcement made any changes to Modern, and players have thus had ample time to zero in on the most powerful decks in the format’s current metagame. In no small part, the decks that have risen to the top have focused around Oko, Thief of Crowns and Urza, Lord High Artificer, and it seems that Wizards of the Coast believes that it is once again time to shake things up in Modern.
As per the January 13, 2020 Magic: The Gathering Banned and Restricted announcement, the following three cards are banned in Modern: Mox Opal, Oko, Thief of Crowns, and Mycosynth Lattice. These Modern bans will go into effect on Magic Online and in tabletop play on Tuesday, January 14, and Wizards has provided some additional information on why these cards have been targeted.
As previously mentioned, decks with Urza, Lord High Artificer at their center have become extremely prevalent in MTG’s Modern metagame, and WotC indicates that the base blue-green version of the deck has been performing very well. More specifically, Wizards states that this Urza deck has been maintaining a non-mirror match win percentage of over 55% and has a “winning matchup against nine of the other ten most popular competitive decks.”
In an attempt to weaken this powerful artifact-based deck, WotC has decided to ban both Mox Opal and Oko, Thief of Crowns, which the developer indicates are “the cards most strongly contributing to the high win rate” of Urza decks. This decision will have an impact beyond the Urza deck as well, as both of these cards see play in a number of other Modern MTG decks, with Oko being the “most-played card in competitive Modern.”
With respect to the banning of Mycosynth Lattice, Wizards points to the interaction between the six-mana artifact and Karn, the Great Creator, a powerful Magic: The Gathering Planeswalker. The combination of these two cards can effectively lock one player completely out of a game, and WotC states that this is occurring “more often than is fun in competitive play.”
While the full impact of the January 13, 2020 MTG Banned and Restricted Announcement remains to be seen, many players are likely to consider it a win. Indeed, Oko, Thief of Crowns has been causing trouble in Modern ever since its printing in Throne of Eldraine, and some fans have been asking for Mox Opal be banned for quite some time. At the very least, hopefully this new B&R announcement will succeed in slightly diversifying the Modern metagame and bringing interest back to the format.
Magic: The Gathering’s Theros: Beyond Death set releases January 24, 2020.
Source: Wizards of the Coast
