January 13, 2020 B&R Announcement

[Oversoul]

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articl...ry-13-2020-banned-and-restricted-announcement

Modern:

• Mox Opal is banned.
• Oko, Thief of Crowns is banned.
• Mycosynth Lattice is banned.

No changes to other formats, but Ian Duke notes that moving forward, Pioneer changes will be synchronized with the other B&R announcements.

 

[Mooseman]

Mycosynth Lattice? Wow, I used that in a Furnace Dragon combo to exile all cards in play for a 12 player table..... It worked with Metal Fatigue in last players end step. Boy did I get groans from everyone.
BTW - I did cycle a land card to Astral Slide the FD out before all artifacts left play...…. I didn't win, but it was fun and only took 3 games to get it to go off.

 

[Oversoul]

In case you haven't been following it, the the reason for the Mycosynth Lattice ban is the combo with Karn, the Great Creator. Ian Duke does mention it in his remarks, but yeah, the latest Karn is a profoundly silly card for them to have come out with. In Vintage, they restricted Karn. So I do find it a bit odd that they targeted Mycosynth Lattice in Modern instead. I am not well-versed in the nuances of Modern, but targeting Mycosynth Lattice instead of Karn strikes me as odd. When they restricted Karn in Vintage, it wasn't really surprising. I can't figure it out. Cynical answer would be that Modern is still a pretty popular format and that War of the Spark is still fresh set that has a lot of relevance for the format, so they might have chosen to ban the older card just because it's old and out of print (it was reprinted in 2018 in Battlebond). More generous answer would be to assume that they've evaluated cards in upcoming, as-yet-unseen-by-us sets and suspect that Karn might be fun with those. I don't know.

Mostly, my reaction is still the same responses of "Unban something in Legacy, you cowards" and "Stop making predictive bans when we already know you're bad at predictions." But maybe I'm just grouchy.