Have you heard the news? Wizards of the Coast has banned Magic: The Gathering. Well… maybe that's overstating things just a little bit, but the company did axe seven cards, hitting almost every single popular deck in the Standard format.
It's an unprecedented situation. The last time Wizards threw this many Standard cards on the MTG banlist in one go was in 2005, and that was to remove the artifact land cycle that powered up Affinity. I don't recall a time where Standard bans were put in place, not just to deal with the obvious deck that everyone's been complaining about (in this case Izzet Prowess) but also to hit all the second-tier decks on the level beneath it.
It seems like nothing has been spared from the banhammer's scourge. The overpowered red decks were obviously decimated, losing not just Cori-Steel Cutter and Monstrous Rage but also one of their mice in Heartfire Hero. But the decks that would've normally risen to take their place: Azorius Omniscience, various forms of Self-Bounce, and Domain Overlords, have all lost important cards, which will hamper or outright end these archetypes.
Standard is truly the Wild West right now. I usually update our best MTG Arena decks page at the start of each month to account for meta changes, but… yeah, I feel like there's not much point doing that today until the dust settles.
It's hard to say what will take the place of the fallen heroes. Aggro normally does well after a meta shakeup, and with the longer rotation, red decks may still have the right cards to pull something together. Other big winners from the banlist shakeup include Dimir Midrange and the two Jeskai decks, strategies that are strong but often played second fiddle to the now nerfed archetypes. Or perhaps something new can rise to the fore - a whole new era of brewing awaits!
Obviously it's a relief to have Izzet squashed, and there'll be a celebratory atmosphere in the community for the next week or two. Beyond that, I lean in favor of big changes like this that attempt to shake up the Standard format and give new strategies a chance to rise to the fore.
But I'm not a paper Standard player, and I have to acknowledge this seems to run counter to Wizards' own stated goals for the MTG format. In 2023, WOTC released an article outlining its big plan to save paper Magic. The idea was to give players more confidence that their physical cards would be a worthwhile investment, with a 3-year Standard rotation and more predictable, sparing bans.
In practice, it was always somewhat shoddily implemented. Wizards stated there would be one set of bans per year, then granted itself lengthy grace periods for emergency bans after each set release, until it appeared there were more days when cards could be banned than when they couldn't. The emergency bans didn't have to target cards from the newly released MTG sets either, so while the designers' commitment to helping paper players out may have inspired some confidence, in reality nothing was truly safe.
But this new announcement seems to completely undermine the plan, and not just because tons of cards got banned. It also seems like Wizards' philosophy around card bannings has fundamentally changed. Let me explain what I mean.
The June 2025 banlist article implies that seven is more cards than the company typically wants to be kicking out in these once-per-year reviews, but it's also pretty explicit that these annual events are intended to go further than the emergency bans do. Rather than dealing with the absolute worst, most broken cards, Wizards seems to be making broader changes to tackle cards it thinks make Standard less 'fun'.
It's a lower barrier to banning than we're used to - normally we have to kick and scream for months before Wizards will finally remove a card, and while I saw some hoping Omniscience would get the chop, I don't think anyone called This Town Ain't Big Enough and Hopeless Nightmare being stuck on the list.
The article even describes the annual ban update as "early rotation", which is a term I've not heard before. I find it a bit cheeky, even, because it seems to imply that these cards would've been gone anyway come August 1, and are just getting banned now to avoid the rush. In fact, none of them would have rotated this year, so while I see that the name fits in a couple of senses, in reality it's more like a second rotation.
It's also notable that we've heard almost nothing from the people who came up with the new Standard strategy. Andrew Brown introduced the concept of the 'one set of bans per year' idea in a Weekly MTG stream in 2023, for instance, and co-wrote the 2024 banlist update (where nothing was banned from Standard). But he's not credited in this year's bannings. We also haven't heard anything from Huey Jensen - who was involved in extending Standard rotation - in ages!
Perhaps this is just a shift in who the community-facing members of the design team are, but it is definitely interesting when considering how drastically, surprisingly different this year's ban update has been.
Overall, it seems like Wizards is more gung-ho about banning cards in Standard now, perhaps than ever before. Which again, I should say, I'm quite happy about, but it is a bit muddling. Do we care about keeping cards in Standard for as long as possible or not? And if we're not worried about that anymore, can we have our two-year rotation back please? Especially now we have six Standard sets a year!
What do you think of the new bans? Come share your opinion in our Discord. You should also check out the MTG release schedule, for the latest news on everything coming up for the TCG.