Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

There was news recently with Magic: The Gathering in their ban list and along with the banning of cards, there was also a slew of cards that were unbanned in the Modern format.

This was met fairly positively by the community, with some trepidation with some cards, most people were happy with the cards banned and the ones that were unbanned.

This got me in the thought process of thinking about ban lists in general, why they are needed in some cases, the philosophies of banning and unbanning cards, and the reaction of the card games community to the ban lists.

Why Ban?

The concept of a ban list is not a new phenomena, it started with Magic, as most things in card games did.

It took the game about five months from the first release of Alpha to released a Banned and Restricted List, which limited the number of copies of a card as well as banned problematic cards like anything that mentioned Ante and Shahrazad.

This seems to be a common enough pattern with card games in which a card is limited to some capacity as Star Wars: Unlimited had their first suspended card in Boba Fett (Collecting the Bounty) last month after being out for eight or so months.

Why ban cards though?

Well that depends very much on the card game, but there are some common factors that they all tend to share.

The most obvious reason is that the card is much stronger than the developers realized.

With Boba Fett, the designers outright said that the card was a “development mistake”, citing that it was much stronger than what they had intended.

It shows because, according to Lead Game Designer Danny Schaefer the card was in the decks of 40% of the Top 8 finishers of their Planetary Qualifiers and present in 55% of the winners decks, it was ubiquitous in its power level.

This was also done for the recent Modern ban list with the banning of The One Ring because of its generic casting cost, protection, and the card advantage it produces.

If a card is very strong and has not major downside, top level competitors will play them and play as many copies as they have until they get banned.

This leads to another common ban complaint in that it homogenizes decks. If any deck can slot in a super powerful card for no down side, why wouldn’t they?

This can lead to a boring play pattern where players see the same sort of decks every single time that they play, the players lose interest and move on to another format, or worse another game.

Companies want people to play their game and more importantly buy more product, so a ban list can be a way to bring player goodwill back and show that they care about the health of the game.

And of course one of the last common reasons why a card is banned is that it creates unfun play patterns.

Going back to Magic’s first ban list, Shahrazad was explicitly banned while many other problematic cards like Black Lotus, the Moxen, etc. were only restricted.

The reason being that even back then, playing with Shahrazad was not fun, took way too long, and didn’t really do anything to progress the game state in an effective manner.

If a card is not fun to play against, then we fall back into the reasoning of players leaving the format or game because they don’t want to deal with those problematic cards anymore.

Necessary?

Bans are an unfortunate necessity for card games, even though they can lead to a lot of mixed feelings among the players of the game.

Many people are glad that a card that was hampering their fun is no longer available to play and hopefully it would make things much easier to play, but there are some players who may have felt that they lost something in a card being banned.

It’s no secret that people spend a lot of money of cards, some for competitive reasons and some for pure financial gain, and these people have the same vector for feeling upset in that they may feel that they lost money if a card gets banned.

Being a top level competitive card game player is not always the most lucrative career path, and more often then not people lose money when they get to that high level of game play.

This was one of the reasons why some professional Yu-Gi-Oh! players were leaving the game, as some of the cards needed to stay competitive were becoming really expensive and Yu-Gi-Oh!’s prize structure does not include monetary prizes.

People lose money to fly to an event only to win a rubber playmat or a game console, which while nice is not ideal.

Now not every game has this issue so it’s not as bad, but sometimes the best players of the game don’t progress into the tournament far enough to recoup their costs.

Then we get to the financial aspect, people and stores who want to sell cards or sealed product to make a profit. While making money selling cards can be lucrative, it is very difficult to do well and the margins can run razor thin.

Stores are the ones who have a much more difficult time with this aspect because if a super expensive card gets banned after they had sold a bunch recently, there may be people who want to try and get what they sold it for when it is no longer considered to be that value any more.

Or even worse, if a store spent a lot of money on opening sealed product or buying copies of cards to sell to their customers, only for the card to no longer be worth what they spent for them any more, meaning that they lose money in the long term.

I feel less sorry for people who view the cards as investment pieces to hoard, because at the end of the day they are cardboard play pieces that we have ascribed value to that are not being played. I would rather have the cards be available to play than pay for a retirement plan.

At the end of the day, what matters is that cards should be evaluated in how they effect the game overall. If the majority of the player base is not having fun in playing the game and it can be attributed by a card or a small number of cards, then they should be banned.

This can, however, lead to some unfortunate consequences.

Bans Gone Wrong

As many people who play Magic may be aware, on September 23rd, 2024, the Commander Rules Committee had banned Nadu, Winged Wisdom, Dockside Extortionist, Mana Crypt, and Jeweled Lotus from the Commander format.

This was met with a number of negative reactions, some of which were very hostile to the members of the Rules Committee and Commander Advisory Group, that eventually the once community led format gave control of it to Wizard’s of the Coast.

The lead up to that event was also marred by statements in how the bans were handled, how the Commander Advisory Group was not informed until one or two days prior to the announcement, people on the Rules Committee making statements that were not received well, the whole thing was a mess.

Having come from a Yu-Gi-Oh! background, seeing massive bans was not news to me because of how often they happen in Yu-Gi-Oh! and since I didn’t own the cards I shrugged and moved on with my day. But there was absolute vitriol and hatred coming from some of the more vocal members of the player base that shocked me.

Putting it lightly, people were not being kind to the Rules Committee, and some members were hit with more abuse than others for reasons not related to the bans themselves.

It was insane to see, especially when the financial aspect of the cards was brought up because people had recently spent money on these expensive cards and numbers in the hundred of thousands to millions were said to have been lost because of the bans.

I do feel bad for people who had just bought those cards within a couple of months of the bans because they may have either just gotten them or they would have been coming soon and they wouldn’t have had the chance to play with them.

On the other hand I cannot abide by people being vile because a card got banned. It was reprehensible that people got as hostile as they did, and the fact that the most popular format that was led by members of the community is now controlled by Wizards of the Coast, shows how these bans effected the members of the Rules Committee.

Bans are hard, and no card game always gets it right. They are a necessary evil for a card game to continue on, and while it may not be a great feeling when the card or cards you spent a lot of money on get banned, they may be necessary to ban for the health of the game overall.

Alternatives

Are there ways to alleviate the bad feelings of bans?

Well Lorcana recently took a crack of this with their first problematic card in Bucky – Squirrel Squeak Tutor in that instead of banning the card outright, they erratad the card.

An errata means that the card keeps the name, but some other aspect of it has changed, in Bucky’s case the ink value and the effect was drastically changed.

The reasons they give make sense and they plan to release reprintings of the card to make sure that people are playing with the most correct version of the card, but I am shaky on cards getting errata.

Yu-Gi-Oh! has had a number of powerful banned cards get an errata to balance them, only for those cards to become sometimes playable in the best case scenario to nearly useless in many other instances.

Konami has a very aggressive reprint policy when compared to other card games, but not every card that gets an errata gets printed in an ideal amount of time.

An errata functionally changes a card, and while this isn’t an issue in online only card games, in paper card games this can make things confusing if you don’t have the most up to date version of the card.

There are also restricted lists, where certain cards can only be played in certain numbers. Yu-Gi-Oh! is the poster child of this in it’s Forbidden and Limited list where some cards are outright banned and some can have one or two copies (the maximum card limit in Yu-Gi-Oh! is three copies of a single card).

The reason why this is done is to make sure that people can still play strong cards, but not consistently have them in every game.

This does help alleviate some of the problem, but sometimes getting the ratios right is difficult and sometimes the wrong card gets limited and the deck isn’t effected at all.

Magic really only sees number of cards restricted in one format, Vintage, and I wonder if other formats could adopt this policy. In fact, Commander used to have a Banned as Commander list, which meant that certain legendary creatures couldn’t be the Commander, but could still be played in the deck.

This was removed to simplify the list, and I do occasionally see people saying that the Banned as Commander list should make a come back.

Going back to limiting the number of cards, it’s hard to do right because players are much more efficient at cracking a meta then the designers of the game.

The player base outnumbers the designers by a factor of thousands, so that many people working to find the best deck in the meta is more of a when and not if. If a player base can make only one copy of a card work and still be a problematic card, then they will do so.

Overall there really is not a clean answer to banning cards. In general I am in favor of banning cards to make a game or format better, but I understand that issues may or may not arise from them.

People are happy with the most recent ban list for Magic, but who’s to say that they will love the next ban list that comes out? Only time will tell.

Thank you for reading, see you next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual