List of Ban List Updates

3/12/2025

CHANGES

Becomes Legal:

--> Underworld Dreams

--> Maze of Ith

--> Strip Mine

--> Demonic Consultation

Becomes Banned:

--> Vampiric Tutor

--> Power Artifact

After testing with decks for some days, we've come to the conclusion that the format's ban list needed some changes.

Power Artifact combos are too strong in an environment with tutoring, the library manipulation of cards like Portent, Brainstorm, Impulse, Lim-Dûl's Vault and with the use of Magma Mine, card from Visions.

(There's also a U/W version that is very strong too)

In addition to this, Vampiric tutor is extremely powerful and adds too much consistency to other combo decks and reduces meta deckbuilding possibilities.

Therefore we think Power Artifact and Vampiric Tutor must get banned.

We don't think Maze of Ith is a card that needs to be banned. There's no reason for keeping it banned. It doesn't reduce diversity nor enables broken combos.

Strip Mine is a card that could be interesting in the format as it can face very dominant lands like Bazaar of Baghdad and Mishra's Factory (card that now will be able to get out of the watchlist). It's a way for non red or black decks to destroy lands too and with the variety of lands in Alliances, Mirage and Visions, it makes sense to get it unbanned.

Underworld Dreams allows for new deckbuilding possibilities in the format and unlike Black Vise, it's a colored card and costs 3 Mana. Plus it can serve to combat blue's card draw, that right now is pretty powerful.

Finally, with the ban of Vampiric Tutor and given that the Mirage Tutors are legal, and that Power Artifact is no longer playable, black could have it's own black tutor a priori, though riskier than Vampiric Tutor, that's why Demonic Consultation gets unbanned (it goes in the watchlist though).

4/12/2025

CHANGES

Becomes Banned: 

--> Strip Mine


Errata:

Mishra's Factory:

Land 

Mishra’s Factory doesn’t assign damage if tapped as a blocker.

{T}: Add {C}. 

{1}: This land becomes a 2/2 Assembly-Worker artifact creature until end of turn. It’s still a land. 

{T}: Target Assembly-Worker creature gets +1/+1 until end of turn.

Changing something again in reaction too the last ban list update:

With Strip Mine in I think that aggro and tempo decks will be too strong targeting basic lands, plus there's already good removal in the format to combat certain lands (R and B, but well, it's color identity). 

There were too many things unbanned at once yesterday.

We are going to address the problem of Mishra's Factory as it is too efficient in lots of decks. The card was not created with the intention of being a 3/3 blocker by itself, as there was the rule that tapped blockers wouldn't deal damage. Returning to the old rule affects both a good chunk of cards and most importantly reduces the strategic aspect of having to choose what to tap when attacking before blockers are declared with Icy's in play for example. We will then issue an errata to Mishras Factory.

13/12/2025

CHANGES

Becomes Banned: 

--> Time Vault

After realizing that Ice age incorporates lots of cards interacting with Time Vault and testing those new Twiddle Vault decks, I have come to the conclusion that the card is too powerful for the format, ensuring turn 4 wins followed by 10mins of no-game. Control decks seemed to find good solutions against the deck but that's it pretty much, and still not that often.